The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'". The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence. This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.
On April 3, 2019, the House Judiciary Committee, which did not receive the unredacted report by its April 2 deadline, voted 24-17 along party lines to approve a resolution which authorizes subpoenas of the full report. The resolution also authorized subpoenas related to five of President Donald Trump's former top advisers, including strategist Steve Bannon, communications director Hope Hicks, chief of staff Reince Priebus, former-White House counsel Donald McGahn and counsel Annie Donaldson.
More InfoThe second method of Russian interference saw the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, hacking into email accounts owned by volunteers and employees of the Clinton presidential campaign, including that of campaign chairman John Podesta, and also hacking into "the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)". As a result, the GRU obtained hundreds of thousands of hacked documents, and the GRU proceeded by arranging releases of damaging hacked material via the WikiLeaks organization and also GRU's personas "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0."
More InfoOn January 25, 2019, Roger Stone, a long time advisor to Donald Trump, was arrested by the FBI at a pre-dawn raid in Florida. The indictment filed by the Office of the Special Counsel contained 7 charges, including obstruction of an official proceeding, witness tampering, and lying to congress in regard to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election and his involvement with WikiLeaks. In the charging document, prosecutors alleged that, after the first Wikileaks release of hacked DNC emails in July 2016, "a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton Campaign. Stone thereafter told the Trump Campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by [WikiLeaks]." The indictment also alleged that Stone had discussed Wikileaks releases with multiple senior Trump campaign officials. By the time of those contacts, it had been publicly reported that the DNC emails had been hacked by Russians and provided to Wikileaks. Stone was convicted of all charges in November 2019, after the conclusion of the investigation.
More InfoThe first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans. In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.
More InfoThe second volume of the report investigated the topic of obstruction of justice, describing ten episodes where Trump may have obstructed justice as president and one episode before he was elected, and analyzing each in terms of the criteria needed to constitute criminal obstruction. The investigation found both public and private actions "by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations". However, Trump mostly failed to influence it because his subordinates or associates refused to carry out his instructions. The Mueller team refrained from charging Trump with obstruction because investigators abided by a DOJ Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that a sitting president cannot stand trial, and they feared that charges would affect Trump's governing and possibly preempt a potential impeachment. In addition, investigators felt it would be unfair to accuse Trump of a crime without charges and without a trial in which he could clear his name. Since they had decided "not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment" on whether to "initiate or decline a prosecution," the special counsel's office "did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President's conduct." The report "does not conclude that the president committed a crime", but specifically did not exonerate Trump on obstruction of justice, because investigators were not confident that Trump was innocent after examining his intent and actions. The report concluded that Congress has the authority to take further action against Trump on the question of obstruction of justice, stating that no one is above the law.
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