WASHINGTON: Donald Trump feared the probe into Russia election meddling led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller would doom his presidency and attempted to fire the top investigator, according to Mueller’s long-awaited report, which was finally released on Thursday.

Shortly after the Justice Department made public the more than 400-page report in redacted form, Trump declared a political victory, saying with a smile: “I’m having a good day.” “GAME OVER,” Trump tweeted earlier, using a “Game of Thrones” style montage that pictured him standing in dramatic fog.

The report, which has been eagerly awaited in the US capital and beyond for months, backed up Trump’s repeated assertions that he did not collude with Russian intelligence efforts to tilt the 2016 presidential election in his favour.

However, the document — based on nearly two years of interviews by Mueller’s team with Trump’s inner circle — emphasised that the president had not been cleared of obstruction of justice.

And while emphatically stating that no Americans took part in the Russian interference, Mueller found that Trump was happy enough to gain an advantage from the dirty tricks.

This included the release by WikiLeaks of emails stolen by Russian agents from the campaign team of Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

“The campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” the report said.

The secretive Mueller probe has consumed Washington — and the first half of Trump’s first term in office — over the last two years.

Throughout, Trump has labelled the investigation a “witch hunt,” while his Democratic opponents have talked up the extraordinary idea that an American president might have been colluding with Russian agents.

Now the report paints an unflattering picture of Trump in crisis mode as the scandal first hit the White House in 2017.

Intelligence services had already been looking into the Russian meddling.

But after Trump fired his FBI director, James Comey, Mueller was appointed as an independent prosecutor to handle the highly sensitive probe.

Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2019