The Daily - New Insights Into the Mueller Report

Episode Date: April 4, 2019

The special counsel’s team sent its report to the attorney general, William P. Barr, who sent a summary of that report to Congress. But some members of the special counsel’s team have told associates that their findings are more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated. Guests: Nicholas Fandos, who covers Congress for The New York Times, and Michael S. Schmidt, who has been covering the special counsel investigation. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the Mueller team sent its report to the Attorney General, William Barr. The Attorney General sent a summary of that report to Congress. Now, new reporting shows members of Mueller's team feel that Barr's summary did not reflect the report they wrote. It's Thursday, April 4th. So take us back to the beginning of last week. What do we know at that point? So we knew that Bill Barr, taking Bob Mueller's three to 400 page report, had gone through it extensively and boiled down what he

called the principal conclusions to just four pages. Nick Fandos covers Congress. Mike Schmidt covers national security. We were in this unusual situation where the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had sent his report to the attorney general, said, I found no evidence that the campaign conspired with Russia to impact the election, but he declined to make a decision on obstruction. And what he said was Mueller didn't reach what Barr called a traditional prosecutorial decision. Mueller didn't reach what Barr called a traditional prosecutorial decision. In other words, Mueller presented evidence for the fact that the president may have obstructed justice, but didn't go as far as to conclude that he had. He essentially punted to the attorney general's office.

And in this case, by Mueller not reaching a determination, he leaves the door open for Barr to come in to say, okay, Mueller didn't make a determination on this issue of obstruction. He did on collusion. I'm going to look at all the facts and he makes a determination, no case to be made here on both of these issues. The problem though, is that the perception is that Mueller, the independent investigator who's there to do an inquiry free of politics, has not made a call on this central question. But Barr, the president's appointee, who's been there just for a few months, The president's appointee, who's been there just for a few months, is making the decision.

So the question is, is the fix in? Why is it if Mueller didn't come to an answer, the attorney general did? So at the beginning of last week, we know that Mueller made the unusual decision not to make a call. And Barr made the unusual decision to make a call. And the question is, why? It's not unusual that Barr made a call. And the question is, why? It's not unusual that Barr made a call. The Justice Department is there to decide whether people broke the law or not, and he was doing that. What's different and unusual here is that Barr and Mueller don't look like they're on the same page. and Mueller don't look like they're on the same page.

Mueller said, I can't make a determination on this issue, and Barr did. So why is it that they looked at it differently? Why was it that Mueller, the prosecutor here, didn't do the one thing that prosecutors at the Justice Department do, which is make a call. And that was the question that we spent the last week trying to figure out. What is the difference here? What is the evidence that they're looking at? And why did Mueller and Barr make the decisions that they made around this question of obstruction of justice? And what have we now learned? What we've now learned is that nobody's happy.

The team that was working, or at least some of the team that was working with Bob Mueller, feels that Barr stepped in and filled a vacuum in a way that didn't properly capture what their 22-month investigation found. And Barr's team feels that Bob Mueller fell short of doing his job. So let's start with the Barr side. Explain more about why the attorney general and those around him are upset. So in not reaching a decision on obstruction of justice, Barr has to go out on his own and make that determination

without the top cover of the independent investigator who went out and was supposed to make a determination on whether the president broke the law. And what do you mean by top cover? One of the reasons you have a special counsel is to insulate an investigation from politics. And then when the investigation is concluded, have a way of holding up the product of the inquiry, the fruits of it to the public and saying, look, this was done free of politics. We assess this matter based on the facts. And now you have a result that is exposed, at least in part, to the perception that the president's guy made the decision. The attorney general. Correct. Undercutting one of the key points of Mueller's

appointment in the first place. And you're saying that the people in the Justice Department and that Barr himself are upset to be put in that position. Well, the system's not working the way it's supposed to. You had Mueller there for one reason, yay or nay on crimes. And on one of these central questions, he couldn't get there. And by stepping back and saying, I don't know, it allows at least the Democrats to say, what, how was this decision made? How did they get to this? How is it that the president's political appointee was the ultimate decider? And it gives them real credence to go and say,

we need to see all the evidence. We need to see the whole file here because the president's handpicked man made this decision. Maybe we'd reach a different conclusion if we looked at the evidence Bob Mueller seems to have. So then why did Barr choose to make a call on obstruction of justice if he knew and was upset that this was going to be seen as hyper-political and that it would fan the flames of Democrats in Congress? The problem for Barr was that when he got the report and looked at the evidence, to him, it was a pretty clear case that you would not press this kind of charge, that the president hadn't obstructed justice. Now, you've got to remember that Barr comes to the job with a pretty

expansive view of executive power. As Democrats made famous, he wrote a memo before he was appointed attorney general, arguing that certain acts by the president shouldn't be construed as obstruction of justice. They're part of his executive powers. And so he looks at this, and I mean, he can't make the same decision that Mueller did. Somebody has to make a choice about whether or not this is a chargeable offense. And he looks at it and says, well, in our judgment and this team's judgment, it's not. So Barr reads the report and thinks, what are you talking about? It's not clear whether or not there was obstruction of justice. There, in his mind, clearly wasn't. Barr does acknowledge that there is evidence, basically, of behavior that could be construed as obstructive.

He gives credence to what Mueller is presenting, but says when you add it all up, it doesn't tip into criminal obstructive territory. Right, and while it felt political for Barr to reach a conclusion, to make a call that Mueller wouldn't, I have to think it would have felt even more political, in Barr's mind, for Congress to be the one to perform that role. And so he was upset to have to make this call, but it sounds like felt that he had to. I don't know if he's upset as much as he looks at this situation and says, this is not the way it's supposed to be working. Someone needs to make

a decision on whether the president broke the law. I'll step in and do that. And I think I can do that based on the facts. And Congress can still play a role. I'm redacting the report. I'll give it to you with sensitive information blacked out, and then you can make your own judgment. But the public has an intense interest in this, and I've got to say something. And I decide whether Axe broke the law or not, and I don't think this one did. Do we know if Mueller's team expected Barr to make this call on obstruction of justice after they declined to do so? We don't know precisely what the Mueller team expected on this obstruction question. It seems that they were not clear in communicating to the Justice Department what

they wanted. It may not have mattered anyway. But what we do know is that after Barr came out with this four-page summary, which essentially exonerated the president on collusion and said he did not break the law on obstruction, some members of Mr. Mueller's team felt that he had inadequately and only partially represented the work of their 22-month investigation. So this is the other side of your reporting, that not only was the Barr side disappointed with the Mueller side, the Mueller side was disappointed with the Barr side.

What we have learned is that since Barr made his public statement about a week ago, members of the Mueller team have told associates that they feel essentially that his work, if it wasn't misrepresentative of theirs, didn't give the full picture, which they believe is more damaging to the president than the attorney general's letter lets on. Now, we are not saying that every member of the Mueller team is frustrated by this. We don't know what Bob Mueller himself thinks. He remains one of the black boxes at the center of this investigation. But there are members of the team who were involved in the decision-making around these issues that we've been talking about

who have watched and been disappointed and angry about how it's being characterized. And what is the focus of their disappointment, to the degree you understand it? So when they read Bill Barr's concise four-page letter, they were frustrated that he had not drawn more from their own work. And in fact, what we discovered in reporting this piece out is that they had prepared summaries of their own work that were part of the report that they handed over to the Justice Department a couple of weeks ago and felt that some of that material could have easily been drawn into what Mr. Barr handed over. So not that he shouldn't have made a decision about whether the president

obstructed justice or not in a criminal sense. But that concurrent with that, he should have put out more of their evidence or analysis to kind of fill out the public picture. The Justice Department says those summaries had sensitive information in them, classified information, grand jury, secretive grand jury information that couldn't become public and ultimately didn't use any of it. So what Mueller's folks are essentially saying is, hey, we wrote these summaries. If you were going to go out and say something about this investigation and you were going to do something as extreme or as declarative as clearing the president, why is it that

you didn't include some of the things that we found? And specifically, why didn't you include some stuff that we found that was pretty damning? You're making it seem like the president didn't do anything wrong. Donald Trump has come out in the days after Barr's declaration and said the Mueller report was beautiful and it completely exonerates him. and said the Mueller report was beautiful and it completely exonerates him. If you're an investigator who spent the last two years looking at Donald Trump and you think there's a lot of questionable behavior there, that is something that is going to irritate you mightily.

I mean, do either of you think that the Mueller people have a legitimate point here? Or is this a classic case of pride of authorship? They wanted to see their work in the public summary. I don't think that we fully know. What seems clear in our reporting is that there was no specific communication or agreement by the Mueller team to the Barr team, you should use these things, or we want these things to be out. They seem to have had an intention, and they certainly now have a regret about it, but we don't know what interaction there was in the actual decision-making process that happened that weekend two weeks ago.

Well, so why do we think that Barr chose not to include more of what was in these summaries, especially the negative material, in his four-page summary? I think there's one big broad reason and another contemporary reason. The broad reason being that Barr and many Justice Department officials and for many years prosecutors believe that if they decide not to charge someone,

the fruits of the investigation should not be just thrown out there for the public or for the enemies of the person who were investigated. Dirty laundry should not be aired if the subject of those dirty laundry are not charged with a crime. If you cannot meet this incredibly high bar of bringing a federal prosecution, that doesn't mean you then get to just take the trash and just sort of throw it out on the street and let the public rummage through it. And Mike, by the contemporary example you referred to, I'm assuming you're talking about James Comey. I'm talking about the July 2016 press conference that James Comey held. It's right in the heat of the presidential election. He stands up and says, we, the FBI, have done this investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of her private email account. We don't think there's a case to be made

here, but we found some very questionable behavior in how she handled sensitive national security secrets. The press conference was seen as very damaging to Clinton, even though a case was never made. that Barr's view would be, I'm not going to be the one to replicate that by drawing from these Mueller team summaries and putting those out into the public sphere. Correct. We don't use criminal investigations to go out and find damaging things that may not be crimes that we then simply release to the public to be used against someone. The problem is this was never a normal or average criminal investigation. It has broad national security implications. It has implications for almost every decision that's made at the highest levels of the government. This is more about a pathway of how you deal with the president's conduct.

And what it appears from the Mueller side is that they're saying, look, this is the president of the United States. There's some conduct here that we think the public in Congress should see. And OK, Justice Department, it may not be criminal, but this is the president, and this needs to be examined more thoroughly by the political process and by Congress. It's about a pathway of dealing with the president. report public as possible. But he doesn't think that that absolves him of the Justice Department's role of saying whether or not the president or his campaign broke the law. And so he's grappling with the Justice Department's aversion to talk about individuals that it's not saying broke the law. But yet he knows that the public and the Congress want and probably are owed more information about what did happen. And so kind of operating somewhere in the middle of those two things.

The difference here is that if I was under investigation and the Justice Department determined that I didn't break the law, then there's no other process that really needs to be dealt with me. Maybe my company needs to decide whether I get fired or not for that conduct. In this instance, there's another issue with the president. Okay, the president didn't break the law, but maybe the president did things with his power that the public should know about, Congress should know about, and need to be more closely examined. Because maybe it's not just about breaking the law. It's about how he conducted himself as president. And does Congress need to deal with that?

And what we are starting to see from Mueller's side is this frustration that, hey, we think there's some bad stuff that happened here. But by Barr coming out and not disclosing that, but saying the president didn't break the law, he is casting the die on how the public will later look at the president's conduct. They will say that for several weeks after we finished our report, the only thing that was out there was Bill Barr saying the president didn't break the law and the president turned around and saying, I was fully exonerated. And they're saying, hey, America, we think more of this process

needs to play out. Right. So this all comes down to the vexing question of how do we investigate a sitting president and how is that done in a way that the public has the utmost confidence in that? And in that is this tension between how much independence the investigator should have. In Nixon, that pendulum swung too far in the president's direction. In the Starr investigation of Clinton, it went the other way. The investigator had too much power. Clinton, it went the other way. The investigator had too much power. And here, between Mueller and Barr's teams, they are fighting that same fight and have different understandings of how this should all be dealt with. And it's the same issue that we've been looking at for 50 years, just the latest episode of it.

So inside of one presidential investigation, these two teams are embodying all the tensions that have basically been present since Watergate. Correct. It's how much you can tell the public and how is apparent misconduct by the president dealt with. And there's no clear pathway on that. So whatever Barr does will be viewed by one side as political and laying on the brakes for the president. Whatever Mueller does will be viewed by the president's enemies as trying to get him. And the confidence in that process then erodes. And it's messy and it's hard to figure out what are the real facts here? What really happened? But at this point, we're just talking about the summary that Bill Barr sent to Congress. We're still waiting on the full report.

So won't this tension that you are describing eventually be more or less resolved when we learn how much information we'll ultimately have access to? It may be, and we may see a very different set of facts at the end of the day. But I think the question here is about who sets the narrative for the intervening period of time. It may end up being a month before we see a fuller version of the Mueller report. And for that time, Bill Barr's conclusion that the president didn't break the law is going to be the kind of dominant narrative. And I think that what we're hearing from members of the Mueller team is a concern that by the time their fuller work does come out, the narrative is baked. So much so that even if it shows, for instance, that the president

didn't break the law but abused his office or conducted acts that Congress will deem, you know, inappropriate for his office, that there's not room to have a full debate around that, that the conclusions about the work that they did for 22 months will have been prejudged at that point, and that it won't quite matter what the report says for the president's political fate. Nick, Mike, thank you very much. Thank you, guys. Thanks for having us. The committee has a job to do.

The Constitution charges Congress with holding the president accountable for alleged official misconduct. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee voted to authorize the use of subpoenas to obtain a full copy of the Mueller report. That job requires us to evaluate the evidence for ourselves, not the attorney general's summary, not a substantially redacted synopsis, but the full report and the underlying evidence. The committee's chairman, Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler of New York, said he would not immediately issue a subpoena, but his power to do so will intensify pressure on the Attorney General, William Barr, to quickly release an unredacted copy of the report. I will give him time to change his mind.

But if we cannot reach an accommodation, then we will have no choice but to issue subpoenas for these materials. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. A Times analysis of deadly terror attacks involving white extremists has found that at least a third of them were inspired by fellow white men who carried out similar attacks and had either professed admiration for them or interest in their tactics.

In one case, a school shooter in New Mexico corresponded with a gunman who attacked a mall in Munich. Altogether, the two men killed 11 people. The connections between the killers cross continents and highlight how the internet and social media have spread white extremism. And. I've always tried to be, in my career, I've always tried to make a human connection. That's my responsibility, I think.

I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, you can do this. On Wednesday, former Vice President Joe Biden responded to a series of complaints from women that his close physical contact had made them uncomfortable. Social norms have begun to change. They've shifted. And the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it. I get it. I hear what they're saying. I understand it. In a video message sent as Biden prepares for a possible presidential run, he defended his behavior but said he is able to change. But I always believe governing, quite frankly, life for that matter, is about connecting.

It's about connecting. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.