Interference review - team behind the Mueller Report describe the 2016 political maelstrom

"The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion," said the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, AKA the Mueller Report. "A Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton."

Robert Mueller, the special counsel, did not criminally charge Trump but did not give him a clean bill of health, contrary to misleading claims made by Bill Barr, Trump's attorney general, in a 24 March 2019 letter - AKA the Barr Report.

Barr's bad-faith action angered Mueller and members of his team, among them prosecutors Aaron Zebley, James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein. So much so, the three have now written a book of their time at what was once the central maelstrom of American politics.

"The purpose of appointing a special counsel was to shield the investigation from political interference so there would be public confidence in the outcome," the three men now write in Interference, their look back at their time in the special counsel's office. "That required the public to see our actual analysis and conclusions, not those of a politically appointed attorney general."

Under the subtitle The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation, Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein shed new light on the decisions not to subpoena or indict Trump, who Mueller nonetheless saw as a "subject" - someone "whose conduct is within the scope of the investigation".

The tenor of Interference is sober, not breathy. Its prose is dry. This is a book by establishmentarian lawyers. Their boss, an ex-US marine and FBI director, earned the sobriquet "Bobby Three-Sticks", a reference to his name and the three-fingered Boy Scout salute.

Justice department protocols barred federal prosecutors from charging an incumbent president, yet doubts lingered. "The department had twice taken the position, in writing, that a sitting president could not be indicted," the authors acknowledge. But "if the special counsel's office had evidence proving Trump truly was a Manchurian candidate, a puppet who was being directed by Russia in a way that was an immediate and ongoing threat, then the public interest in an indictment might be so great as to warrant pushing the department to revisit the [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion in order to safeguard the nation".