Mark Landler

The Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller III, a former FBI director, as special counsel to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, dramatically raising the legal and political stakes in an affair that has threatened to engulf Trump’s four-month-old presidency.

The decision by the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, came after a cascade of damaging developments for President Trump in recent days, including his abrupt dismissal of FBI Director James Comey and the subsequent disclosure that President Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Rosenstein had been under escalating pressure from Democrats, and even some Republicans, to appoint a special counsel after he wrote a memo that the White House initially cited as the rationale for Comey’s dismissal. By appointing Mueller, a former federal prosecutor with an unblemished reputation, Rosenstein could alleviate uncertainty about the government’s ability to investigate the questions surrounding the Trump campaign and the Russians. Rosenstein said that he concluded that “it is in the public interest for me to exercise my authorities and appoint a special counsel to assume responsibility for this matter.”

Human Rights Watch released its annual report on threats to human rights around the world, and for the first time in the 27 years it has done these surveys, the United States is one of the biggest. The reason: the rise of Donald J. Trump.

Eight days before Trump is to be sworn in as president, the human-rights advocacy group declared that his path to power, in a campaign marked by “misogynistic, xenophobic and racist rhetoric,” could “cause tremendous harm to vulnerable communities, contravene the United States’ core human rights obligations, or both.” This is not the first time Human Rights Watch has cast the United States as a bad actor. After the terrorist attacks in September 2001, it took the administration of President George W. Bush to task for waterboarding and other interrogation techniques widely considered to be torture. But Kenneth Roth, the organization’s executive director, said in an interview: “This is a more fundamental threat to human rights than George Bush after 9/11. I see Trump treating human rights as a constraint on the will of the majority in a way that Bush never did.”

President Barack Obama said that he refrained from taking aggressive public action in retaliation for Russian hacking of Democratic Party institutions before the presidential election because he was concerned that such moves might be interpreted as unfair meddling in the campaign. In a news conference before leaving for a two-week vacation in Hawaii, President Obama said that he told President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in September to “cut it out,” but that the United States government did not retaliate in a public way before the Nov. 8 election. “We did not,” he told reporters. “And the reason we did not was because in this hyperpartisan atmosphere, at a time when my primary concern was making sure that the integrity of the election process was not in any way damaged,” such a move would “immediately be seen through a partisan lens.”

President Obama lamented the powerful effect that fake news had on the 2016 presidential election, condemning "domestic propagandists." “If fake news released by foreign government is almost identical to reports that are issued through partisan news venues,” he said, “then it's not surprising that that foreign propaganda will have a greater effect, because it doesn't seem that farfetched.”

The dispute over Hillary Clinton’s email practices now threatens to shadow her for the rest of the presidential campaign after the disclosure that the FBI collected nearly 15,000 new emails in its investigation of her and a federal judge’s order that the State Department accelerate the documents’ release. As a result, thousands of emails that Clinton did not voluntarily turn over to the State Department could be released just weeks before the election in November.

The order, by Judge James Boasberg of Federal District Court, came the same day a conservative watchdog group separately released hundreds of emails from one of Clinton’s closest aides, Huma Abedin, which put a new focus on the sometimes awkward ties between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department. The FBI discovered the roughly 14,900 emails by scouring Clinton’s server and the computer archives of government officials with whom she corresponded. In late July, it turned them over to the State Department, which now must set a timetable for their release, according to Judge Boasberg’s order.