The Justice Department and FBI have turned over to BuzzFeed News and CNN another batch of highly secretive interview summaries from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and President Trump’s attempts to obstruct the inquiry.
The agencies turned over a summary of Jared Kushner’s December 2017 interview with the FBI, the contents of which are almost entirely redacted. Other interview summaries in this installment include former White House press secretary Sean Spicer; White House chief of staff Reince Priebus; Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen; Justice Department attorney Jody Hunt; former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe; Mark Corallo, who was a spokesman for Trump’s legal team; real estate mogul Tom Barrack who served as chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee and more than a dozen others.
Excerpts from some of the interview summaries, known as FBI 302s, are sprinkled throughout Mueller’s report, but many details were omitted. For example, interview summaries released to BuzzFeed News last month included the news that after the FBI raided the home of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, he used Fox News host Sean Hannity as a “back channel” to President Trump. Those documents also included what might be the earliest reference yet, from the summer of 2016, to the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails. That theory has been at the heart of Trump’s impeachment trial.
