Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781, Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.
The 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.
More InfoOn April 9, 2019, Attorney General William Barr testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee. Barr announced that the Department of Justice will be "reviewing the conduct" of the FBI's Russia probe. "I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016," Barr said. Barr also said that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz will be releasing a report on the FBI's use of the FISA process and related matters. The report is expected to be released in May–June 2019. When asked whether he was suggesting that spying occurred, Barr said, "I think that spying did occur. But the question is whether it was predicated, adequately predicated. And I'm not suggesting it wasn't adequately predicated, but I need to explore that."
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 first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort. The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.
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."
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