Front Burner - Mueller: no collusion, no obstruction, no exoneration
Episode Date: March 25, 2019A summary of Robert Mueller's investigation into possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 election is out. CBC Washington correspondent Keith Boag breaks down what we know so far, and the implic...ations for the Trump administration.
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Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson.
After nearly two years, 500 witnesses, almost 3,000 subpoenas,
and 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence,
we now have a much better sense of what special counsel Robert Mueller has found.
On Sunday afternoon, Attorney General William Barr released a summary of the investigation,
which was looking into whether there was collusion between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election.
Bill Barr has just submitted a four-page single-spaced letter to Congress.
Bottom line, he concludes there was no collusion.
On obstruction of justice, Mueller himself weighed the evidence without drawing conclusions.
Quote, while the report does not conclude that the president committed a crime,
it also does not exonerate him.
Today, what we know so far and what comes next, because this is far from over.
This is FrontBurner.
My colleague Keith Bogue has been covering the story from the beginning.
Keith, it's incredible to think that this is finally here after two years.
Yeah, and all of it happening so quickly, too, in the space of just a couple of days.
I know.
It's changed.
I want to go through with you what Mueller concluded in his report.
But first, we should make clear that what was released on Sunday afternoon isn't actually Mueller's report.
What was released on Sunday afternoon isn't actually Mueller's report.
It's a summary of his report, four-page summary of his report, written by current Attorney General William Barr.
That's right.
There's really only about two pages of it that are substantial.
And those two pages are written, as you say, by the Attorney General William Barr. And they include maximum, I think, four sentence fragments from the actual
report itself. And do we know how long the actual report is? We don't. We don't. And that's an
important piece of information to get a sense of how to evaluate this document. Is this, you know,
a substantial fraction or a tiny fraction of what Mueller actually reported? Okay. So we don't have the actual report,
but the big headline from the summary of the report
written by the current Attorney General
is that Robert Mueller did not find any evidence
that Donald Trump or anyone on his team
conspired or coordinated with the Russian government
in its election interference activities.
And were you surprised by how conclusive this was?
Well, you know, not really. I didn't think it was the only question about Russia,
but it certainly is the highest profile question. And it's the question that I think the president
wanted the whole investigation to be judged by. After, you know, 18 months at least of him saying
no collusion, no collusion, no collusion. There has been absolutely no collusion.
Phony witch hunts going against me.
It's a Democrat hoax.
It's pretty clear that that's how he wanted to frame the document
when it finally came out, the Mueller report,
on a straight up or down question, was there collusion, yes or no?
And he felt pretty confident that the answer would be no
and that the whole report should be judged by the answer to that single question.
But, you know, what we see are hints,
and they're only hints really because there isn't a lot of detail in this letter, by the answer to that single question. But, you know, what we see are hints,
and they're only hints really because there isn't a lot of detail in this letter,
but that Mueller found that it wasn't for lack of trying,
certainly on the part of Russians
who were offering things to the Trump campaign,
and it certainly wasn't for lack of trying
insofar as what we knew publicly anyway
about, for instance, Donald Trump Jr.'s
taking a
meeting with Russians that included also his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the campaign
manager, Paul Manafort, the famous New York City Trump Tower meeting, where they thought they were
going to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russians. And their response to that possibility
was, if it's what you say it is, I love it. I mean, that's not in
the letter here. That's probably going to be something that people will be looking for when
they get the final report. And around this idea of collusion, what other big questions do you have
that are unanswered with the summary that we got today? Well, I think, again, you know, the
charges that were laid with respect to the campaign,
a lot of them were charges that had to do with lying about contacts with Russia.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team slamming former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI.
Prosecutors for Special Counsel Robert Mueller accused Paul Manafort of lying to them and to the FBI.
So I think fundamentally the question is, why did so many of them lie?
Why were they trying to cover up something about their relationship with Russians?
And what was that thing they were trying to cover up?
I think we still want to see that in the report.
We got no closer to an answer to that question, what we saw from the attorney general.
That's interesting because the last time we spoke, that was sort of the central question that you were struggling with.
And I was curious to know today if what we found out today changed that for you.
But I'm guessing, listening to you now, it hasn't.
Well, I think it is the fundamental question because it is the one that created so much suspicion to begin with.
It's why people took seriously the idea that there might have been some form of collusion.
It wasn't just that they had these meetings.
It wasn't just that they had these conversations.
It was they consistently and repeatedly lied about them.
The second part of the summary of Mueller's report from William Barr today
deals with this question of obstruction,
whether or not Trump or anyone in his team tried to interfere with the Russia investigation.
And Barr says that Mueller didn't come to a clear conclusion around that
and then essentially left it to him
to make the decision. That was what I got from the letter. What do you make of that?
What Mueller said, according to the letter, is apparently that there is evidence on both sides
of the question of whether the president tried to obstruct justice. Evidence on both sides.
Evidence to support that he did try to obstruct it. Evidence that goes the other way. And so he didn't make a decision.
He, as some have said, punted the decision to the Attorney General.
I'm not sure that we can trust that interpretation of it, though.
We know that the Attorney General made the decision.
We know also that he didn't have to make a decision.
He could have said the same thing that Mueller said, that really this is something that can't be determined by the available evidence.
Perhaps it's an issue for Congress to decide.
Certainly obstruction of justice has been a part of impeachment,
modern impeachment processes in Congress, both with Richard Nixon and with Bill Clinton.
So it would be a natural thing for them to consider this question.
But he has made a decision that is now very, very public, that the president is underlining heavily,
heavily, heavily, that there was no obstruction. So it's complete exoneration, no collusion,
no obstruction. Thank you very much. Thank you. This idea that there could be evidence on both
sides, when you say that there could be evidence on both sides, what does that mean?
Well, we don't know. We don't know exactly what Robert Mueller is thinking of.
We do know that some of it might be the things that we saw in public.
When we saw that Donald Trump famously in an interview with NBC News not long after he fired James Comey, he said that he fired him because of this Russia thing. When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump
and Russia is a made up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.
And we know that he bragged with the Russian ambassador and the foreign
minister of Russia in the Oval Office.
The New York Times has been read a description of the president's remarks to the Russian
officials in his meeting at the Oval Office with them, in which he called allegedly FBI
Director James Comey a nut job and said that he had relieved some of the pressure of the
Russia investigation by firing Comey.
We've seen all kinds of evidence on his Twitter feed that the president was really trying
to pressure people into not cooperating with the investigation of Robert Mueller.
And when they did, in the case of Michael Cohen, his former lawyer,
the president called him a rat.
When Paul Manafort refused to cooperate with the Mueller investigation,
the president treated him as though he was a stand-up guy
and has since continued to say that Paul Manafort, notwithstanding the fact that he's been convicted of a variety of crimes, is nevertheless a victim in all of this.
And I feel badly for him. I think it's a very sad situation.
So those are the kinds of things that might support an accusation that the president was obstructing justice.
But then I think it goes to what was on the president's mind.
Was he aware that what he was doing could be considered obstruction of justice?
Was he motivated by that?
Were there other legal tests that need to be met to sustain a charge.
So I think that's where the argument resides.
And Mueller found it essentially impossible for him to decide.
William Barr has now come out and said that he does not think that there's evidence to charge Donald Trump with obstruction of justice.
And that Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, is backing him up on this.
So what should we think of that?
Well, I think it's a question that Democrats are seized with now.
They are already accusing William Barr of being biased, in particular with regard to the question
of obstruction.
We've also heard from the top Democrat in the House Judicial Committee, Jerry Nadler.
Attorney General Barr, who auditioned for his role with an open memorandum suggesting
that the obstruction investigation was unconscionable.
They point to the fact that even before he became Attorney General, he had written a
kind of briefing note saying that the idea that the president could even be considered obstructing justice is essentially nonsense.
You repeatedly referred to Mueller's, quote, sweeping and all-encompassing interpretation of Section 1512, which is a statute on obstruction.
I was writing in the dark, and we're all in the dark.
I can't help but think that this is also someone that Donald Trump has appointed
to the position of attorney general.
He was my first choice from day one, respected by Republicans and respected by Democrats.
And to be fair, William Barr has been very clear that he wants to be as transparent as possible in this process.
And, you know, I know he has a reputation of integrity, but are there concerns around whether or not he could skew this process?
Well, I think Democrats are suggesting today that they believe he already has skewed the process by taking it upon himself to say that the president did not obstruct justice.
Earlier today, I received a four-page letter from Attorney General Barr outlining his summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report
while making a few questionable legal arguments of his own.
There is a Justice Department policy that says you can't charge,
you can't indict a sitting president.
So that wasn't really the question, whether he was going to charge him or not.
The question was, was he going to say that Mueller is correct and that there's evidence on both sides
of the question of whether the president obstructed justice? Or was he going to make
a determination? And he chose to make a determination. So even though the Justice
Department policy is that he would not be able to indict, he went farther and said he wouldn't indict even if he were.
He didn't. And he's quite explicit in the letter that he's not saying he wouldn't indict on obstruction of justice because it's the president.
He's saying he wouldn't indict the president under any circumstance.
He wouldn't indict on this set of facts.
the president under any circumstance. He wouldn't indict on this set of facts. And Democrats are already suspicious of that because it's a conflict between Mueller's analysis of the facts and the
Attorney General's analysis of the facts. And that is going to be one of their prime lines of
interrogation as they begin to dig deeper and deeper into what the Mueller report actually
found. So what's next for them? What's their next play here? I think they want to hear directly from
some of the principals here. They certainly want to hear from the Attorney General. They want to
have him in front of a committee. We'll see in the days ahead what kind of cooperation they get. I
think it'd be an extraordinary thing in a circumstance
such as this with such a high profile if the Attorney General wasn't going to cooperate. I
mean, he reports to them. He has a responsibility to report to them. I would expect they would also
want to hear from Robert Mueller. And we'll see how far they pursue that. We'll see what kind of
willingness Robert Mueller would have to appear before them.
I suspect that he would have respect for the committee and appear before them.
They may, in a sense, want to duplicate the investigation that Robert Mueller has already done
and see if they arrive at the same conclusions that Mueller did and that the attorney general did.
What about people who might say, wow, that seems like a lot,
like this team of crackerjack lawyers and this incredible investigator backed by the FBI has
already spent two years on this. I mean, Donald Trump, of course, said today that he's completely
exonerated, that there's no collusion, that there was nothing wrong. But is it possible that there
just no one did anything wrong here? It's possible that no one did anything wrong here,
but I think the thing to bear in mind is that this is just a letter
written by someone who looked at the report over, you know, a couple of days.
It is not the report itself.
When the report comes, or what can be released of it is made public,
different people might see different things in it.
There may be all kinds of questions that come out of new information can be released of it is made public, different people might see different things in it. There
may be all kinds of questions that come out of new information from the actual report.
And what do we know today about when we might see more of this report? I know we don't even
know how many pages it is, but conceivably when we might see more of the report and like what
has to be done in order for the public to see more of the report? And like, what has to be done in order for the public to
see more of the report? Well, it has to be scrubbed. That means that the intelligence
community, for instance, will have a look at what the risks of releasing the whole report are. And
they will say, look, this reveals things about our own sources and methods that would endanger
national security if they became public. So those things have to be redacted. There may be legal reasons, for instance, people who appeared
before the grand jury, but have not been charged with anything, who have a right to protect their
anonymity. And so the Justice Department may say, well, that gets redacted there. How much of that
leaves, how much of the report that leaves to be made public, we really have no idea.
We don't know how long it is.
We don't know how serious any of those considerations are.
So we are going to get more of the report, but we don't know how much.
We kind of know that we're not going to get the whole thing ever.
Here's what Bernie Sanders had to say not long ago.
What I know is that it is a summary of the report.
Well, I don't want a summary of the report.
I want the whole report.
Because nobody, especially this president, is above the law.
Robert Mueller was also looking at Russia's attempts to meddle in the U.S. presidential election.
And of course, we know that there were 25 Russian intelligence operatives that have already been indicted by his office.
And William Barr also dealt with that in his summary today.
Yeah, in the part on interference in the 2016 U.S. election,
he divided the interference into two categories,
that Russians were running a disinformation campaign during the 26th election.
And that separately from that, they had this attack on the DNC.
That's the Democratic National Committee's computer.
We all know that they were able to get hold of emails from Democrats and then emails from Hillary Clinton that proved embarrassing to the campaign.
Twelve Russian intelligence officers are charged with hacking into the email servers of the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign,
plus stealing U.S. voter data
during the 2016 election. So he repeats all of that and says, you know, those were the things
that the Russians who were indicted were apparently guilty of, but there is no connection between
either of those things and the Trump campaign. So in a way, he rolls them out to say this is what
we know and this is the depth of our investigation
into all of that. And you put it all together. If there was collusion, we would have found it.
We're sort of in the aftermath now of the Mueller investigation, but there are also all of these
other investigations that are currently going on, looking at Donald Trump and his business or his inaugural committee. And can you tell me
a little bit about those and how this fits in and how they fit into this bigger picture?
Yeah, I mean, there are some people who think the most serious investigations and the ones that
Trump is most worried about have to do with investigations into his business, Trump Inc. in New York,
investigations into the Inauguration Committee, which raised an awful lot of amount, a record amount of money for his inauguration.
But there seems to be little evidence of what it was actually spent on.
And there are questions about, well, where did the money actually go?
And there's an investigation into the Trump Charitable Foundation, which has since closed down amid accusations that it was really a kind of tool for the Trump family to funnel money from the charity into their own pockets or for their own uses.
Those are things that will continue to be investigated and quite possibly lead to further charges in the Southern District of New York. And, you know, there are a lot of questions coming out of that that have yet to be answered. And the possibility is that they will reveal such things
in the process about Trump's business dealings, about his tax returns, about his relationships
with other people who might be implicated in crimes. There's a lot left to be investigated.
Those investigations are underway. None of them seems to have had the profile of the Mueller
investigation, but that should not be mistaken for concluding that they aren't as important as
the Mueller investigation. Some might be even more important. Right. I mean, I've heard several
commentators say that he should be more concerned with the investigations coming out of the Southern
District of New York. Yeah, for a number of reasons. I mean, they get to some of those
investigations are going to go into a long history of Trump's business dealings
that will have overlaps with his connections with Russia, with banks,
almost certainly with Russians who have been implicated in money laundering, whether that affects the president.
Yeah, there's believed to be a lot there to occupy investigators for a while.
Keith, thank you so much.
Thanks, Jamie.
So the last time that we talked to Keith, it was about a month ago, and Keith took us through everything that we know Robert Mueller was looking at when it came to the Russia investigation in chronological order.
For example, that infamous Trump Tower meeting. And I think that it's a really excellent companion
piece to what you just heard. You can find it in our feed.
That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging.
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