Narrator: Imagine spending nearly two years of your life on the most high-stakes investigation in modern American history, meticulously gathering evidence, flipping witnesses, and navigating a minefield of political pressure. Then, just as your work is complete, you’re driving through the Lincoln Tunnel and hear on the radio that the Attorney General of the United States has just publicly summarized your findings in a way that feels like a complete distortion. This was the reality for prosecutor Andrew Weissmann on March 24, 2019. The four-page letter from Attorney General William Barr seemed to clear President Trump, a conclusion Weissmann and his colleagues felt was a betrayal of their exhaustive work.

This moment of profound disillusionment is the catalyst for Andrew Weissmann's book, Do Justice: A Prosecutor's Account of Five Years in the Department of Justice and the Mueller Investigation. It serves as a definitive insider’s account, not just of what the Special Counsel’s Office found, but of the immense pressures, internal debates, and strategic decisions that shaped one of the most consequential investigations in the nation's history.

Narrator: The core conflict of Do Justice is established before the first chapter even begins. After 22 months of work, the Special Counsel’s Office delivered its report, a document detailing extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election and numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. While the report did not establish a criminal conspiracy, it laid out a pattern of behavior so alarming that it raised profound counterintelligence concerns. Furthermore, it presented ten separate episodes of potential obstruction of justice by President Trump, explicitly stating that while it did not conclude the President committed a crime, it also did not exonerate him.

However, the American public didn't hear this. Instead, they heard from Attorney General William Barr. In a four-page summary, Barr declared that the investigation found no evidence of collusion and that he and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, had personally concluded there was no obstruction. To Weissmann and his team, this was a stunning misrepresentation. Barr’s letter created a public narrative of total exoneration that was nearly impossible to undo, even after the redacted report was released weeks later. Weissmann felt that Barr, an institutionalist he had once trusted, had acted as a political fixer for the President. This perceived betrayal of the Department of Justice and the American public’s right to the unvarnished truth is what compelled Weissmann to write his account.

Narrator: From its inception, the Special Counsel’s Office operated with a sense of extreme urgency, best captured by Robert Mueller’s constant, demanding question to his prosecutors: "When are you going to indict?" The team knew their primary target for understanding any potential coordination with Russia was Paul Manafort, Trump's one-time campaign chairman with deep, lucrative, and often shadowy ties to pro-Russian figures in Ukraine.

The core strategy was to "flip" him—to build such an overwhelming case of financial crimes against him that he would have no choice but to cooperate and tell them everything he knew. When the team took over existing investigations into Manafort, they were shocked at how slowly they had been moving. The FARA Unit, responsible for enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act, had negotiated with Manafort's lawyers for months without taking basic investigative steps. Worse, they had handed over key documents to Manafort’s attorney, allowing him to tailor his story to the evidence. The investigation into money laundering had also stalled. Weissmann’s team, particularly the elite financial investigators of "Team M," injected new life into the case, quickly uncovering a mountain of evidence of tax fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering on a massive scale.

Narrator: While Team M focused on Manafort, another team investigated a pivotal event: the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. The story, broken by The New York Times, revealed that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had met with a Russian lawyer with the explicit promise of receiving damaging information on Hillary Clinton, offered as "part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump." Don Jr.'s now-infamous email response—"If it's what you say, I love it"—was a stunning piece of evidence showing the campaign's willingness to accept foreign assistance.

What followed was a classic cover-up. The investigation uncovered that President Trump himself, aboard Air Force One, personally dictated a misleading statement for his son. The initial draft acknowledged the meeting was about potentially helpful campaign information, but Trump ordered that part removed. The final statement claimed the meeting was "primarily" about the adoption of Russian children—a known euphemism for discussing the Magnitsky Act, a set of sanctions opposed by the Kremlin. This attempt to conceal the meeting's true purpose provided powerful evidence of a consciousness of guilt.

Narrator: The Special Counsel’s Office operated under a constant, pervasive threat: that President Trump could fire them at any moment. This fear was not theoretical; Trump had already fired FBI Director James Comey. Mueller’s deputy, Aaron Zebley, would frequently interrupt meetings with grave warnings that the "hammer might be dropping." This created a "go for the arteries, leave the capillaries" mentality, forcing the team to prioritize its most critical leads.

This pressure had a direct impact on investigative decisions. The team took extraordinary measures to safeguard their work, creating a centralized file system and using court filings as an "external hard drive" to ensure their findings couldn't be erased, much like the Watergate prosecutors had done. However, it also made them cautious. They hesitated to pursue certain avenues, such as subpoenaing Trump’s financial records from Deutsche Bank or interviewing Ivanka Trump, for fear of provoking the President into shutting them down. The power to fire the investigators became a form of passive obstruction, compelling the team to make concessions they otherwise would not have.

Narrator: Beyond individual contacts, the investigation uncovered a sophisticated, multi-pronged attack on American democracy by the Russian government. This "active measures" campaign had two main arms. The first was a "hack and dump" operation run by the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. They used spear-phishing emails to steal vast amounts of data from the DNC and the Clinton campaign, which they then strategically released through fronts like Guccifer 2.0 and, most notably, WikiLeaks.

The second arm was a sprawling disinformation campaign run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Kremlin-backed troll farm. The IRA created thousands of fake social media accounts posing as American activists to spread divisive content, suppress African American voter turnout, and promote Donald Trump. They even organized real-world rallies in the United States. After Trump's victory, IRA employees reportedly celebrated with champagne, boasting, "We made America great." The indictment of thirteen Russian nationals for this operation was a landmark moment, providing an undeniable public accounting of Russia's information warfare.

Narrator: The investigation methodically documented a clear pattern of obstructive acts by the President. When Jeff Sessions informed Trump of Mueller's appointment, the President slumped in his chair and said, "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked." This reaction set the tone for what was to come.

The most dramatic instance of attempted obstruction involved White House Counsel Don McGahn. In June 2017, Trump called McGahn and ordered him to tell Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller, citing manufactured conflicts of interest. McGahn, a dedicated institutionalist, refused. He believed the order was a dangerous echo of the "Saturday Night Massacre" and prepared to resign rather than carry it out. He was ultimately talked into staying, but his detailed testimony provided the investigation with its most compelling evidence of Trump’s corrupt intent to shut down the inquiry. This, combined with attempts to influence witnesses and control the investigation's scope, formed the basis of the ten episodes of potential obstruction detailed in the final report.

Narrator: As the investigation wound down, the team faced its most contentious internal debate: whether to issue a grand jury subpoena to force President Trump to testify. Weissmann and others argued passionately that it was essential. Without hearing from the President directly, they could not fully assess his intent, and the final report would be, in Weissmann’s words, "Hamlet without Hamlet." They also feared setting a dangerous precedent that future presidents could not be compelled to testify.

Mueller, however, ultimately decided against it. He was a pragmatist and an institutionalist, deeply concerned about a protracted legal battle that could delay the report for years and might ultimately fail at the Supreme Court. He believed they had gathered sufficient evidence to lay out the facts without the President's testimony. This decision, however, was a critical one. It meant the investigation concluded without questioning its central figure, leaving a significant gap in the historical record and contributing to the ambiguity that Barr would later exploit.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Do Justice is that the American system of justice, while staffed by dedicated professionals, is profoundly vulnerable to the corrupting influence of political power. The Mueller investigation was not, as its critics claimed, a "witch hunt" that came up empty. It was a thorough and successful investigation that uncovered extensive foreign interference and a pattern of presidential obstruction but was ultimately hamstrung by political pressure and a series of cautious, institutionalist decisions.

Weissmann leaves the reader with a sobering challenge. The book is a warning that the rule of law is not self-executing; it must be defended. He argues for concrete reforms to the special counsel regulations to ensure greater independence and transparency. The ultimate question posed by Do Justice is not just about what happened in 2016, but whether the nation has the will to fortify its democratic institutions against the threats that the Mueller investigation so clearly exposed.