The Daily - Robert Mueller’s Testimony

Episode Date: July 25, 2019

The former special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, testified on Wednesday before Congress. He declared that his two-year investigation did not exonerate President Trump and that Russia would meddle again in American elections. Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, who has been covering the special counsel investigation for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading:Lawmakers hunted for viral sound bites and tried to score political points, but Mr. Mueller consistently refused to accommodate them in his long-awaited appearance before Congress.Here are seven takeaways from the hearings.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Today. Robert Mueller finally testifies before Congress, declaring that his two-year-long investigation did not exonerate President Trump and that Russia will meddle again. It's Thursday,

July 25th. Hello? Hey. Sorry, I was listening to Trump. What was he saying? Yeah, it was terrible for the Democrats. Are you eating? Yeah. I know that's not proper. What are you eating?

Cookie. Mike Schmidt covered Mueller's testimony for The Times. The Judiciary Committee will come to order. Okay, Mike, let's talk about these hearings. You had warned us that Robert Mueller would be highly disciplined, he would be circumspect, and that he would more or less deliberately try to be boring. So how did he start this day of hearings? Good morning, Chairman Adler. As you know, in May 2017,

the acting attorney general asked me to serve as special counsel. Mueller starts with an opening statement that largely stays within the four square corners of his report. The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in its election interference activities. He lays out what they found. And given my role as a prosecutor, there are reasons why my testimony will necessarily be limited. And as a warning to the House members, he's essentially saying, you guys can try and get me to say the things that you want politically for me to say,

but I'm probably not going to say them. I therefore will not be able to answer questions about certain areas that I know are of public interest. And then what we see at the end of his statement is a little peek that he gave us into his mind. Let me say one more thing. Over the course of my career, I have seen a number of challenges to our democracy.

The Russian government's effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious. He's there because there's three issues to talk about. Obstruction, collusion, and Russian interference in the election. And he shows at the end of that statement the importance that the issue of Russian interference has to him. That it's the most important. Correct. As I said on May 29th, this deserves the attention of every American. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mueller's sort of signaling, look, Russian interference in the election in 2016 was a huge deal, and it could be a problem going forward. Please pay attention. Right. And of course, the Democrats are in charge of these hearings. So how do they start their questioning of Mueller? I will begin by recognizing myself for five minutes. So right off the bat, Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, ticks through a bunch of yes or no questions that show that the president's statements about the Mueller investigation's findings are inaccurate. The president has repeatedly claimed that your report found there was no obstruction and that it completely and totally exonerated him.

That is not what your report said, is it? Correct. That is not what the report said. And what about total exoneration? Did you actually totally exonerate the president? No. Right. And those felt exactly like what you had predicted the Democrats wanted Mueller to say and that what Neil Katyal, who wrote the rules for the special counsel, actually advised the Democrats to do. Yeah. And that's potentially powerful political fodder heading into an election. Right. And it's also a kind of embrace of what the Democrats understand to be this limited, restrained approach from Mueller. They're kind of working with what they've got.

Yeah. The other thing that Mueller had done was say that he was not going to read from the report. So the Democrats were not even going to have the opportunity of using Mueller going through the document in his own voice as a way of bringing this to life. So they're basically reduced to setting up yes or no questions that contrast between what Trump has said and what's actually in the report. And the second thing is that it leaves the Democrats as the storytellers. Okay, how do the Democrats work within those constraints? They're focusing on the greatest hits of the obstruction section of the report, volume two. Your investigation found evidence that President Trump took steps to terminate the special counsel, correct? Correct. The president's orders, Don McGahn, to deny that the president tried to fire the special counsel

and many others. Is that correct? Yes. Despite knowing that Attorney General Sessions was not supposed to be involved in the investigation, the president still tried to get the attorney general to unrecuse himself after you were appointed special counsel. Is that correct? Yes. It's the same incidents that we've been looking at for the past two years. But if you're the average person and you have not obsessed about these different incidents, then if you looked up at the television on Wednesday morning, you were seeing an example of the president's behavior,

perhaps in a way that you hadn't before. The investigation found substantial evidence that when the president ordered Don McGahn to fire the special counsel and then lie about it, Donald Trump, one, committed an obstructive act, two, connected to an official proceeding, three, did so with corrupt intent. Those are the elements of obstruction of justice.

And at the end, they said, if the president had been anyone besides the president, he would have definitely been charged with obstruction of justice. If anyone else had ordered a witness to create a false record and cover up acts that are subject of a law enforcement investigation, that person would be facing criminal charges. It is clear that any other person who engaged in such conduct would be charged with a crime. The point has been underscored many times, but I'll repeat it. No one. No one. No one is above the law. Is above the law. Is above the law. No one. And they sort of say that quickly, hoping that maybe Mueller won't say anything

and his silence will sort of validate their claim. But at times, Mueller would sort of step in and say, well, you know. Let me just say, if I might, I don't subscribe necessarily to your, the way you analyze that. I'm not saying it's out of the ballpark, but I'm not supportive of that analytical charge. That's not the determination we made. Well, Mike, with that in mind, you had told us that the Democrats' biggest goal,

their kind of fantasy version of this hearing, would be to draw from Robert Mueller the concession that if Donald Trump were not president, he would be charged with a crime. And so what you're describing so far seems like them not quite directly confronting that. So the Democrats are sort of plodding along, trying to get that great soundbite, that one killer quote from Mueller to really put things over the top. And then Congressman Ted Lieu of California comes up. Thank you, Director Mueller, for your long history of service to our country.

And he goes directly for one of the chief questions about the report, which is if it were not for this Justice Department rule that says that a president cannot be indicted, would Mueller have indicted the president? I'd like to ask you, the reason, again, that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of OLC opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct? That is correct. Mueller says yes. A big moment. Correct.

And in the office here, we're all kind of looking at each other saying, did he mean to say that? He knows what a big deal it would be to say he did believe the president broke the law because it essentially signals to Congress that there was enough to charge him. And if the prosecutor is saying that,

then it certainly makes the notion of impeachment even greater. And this notion sort of hangs out there and we're like, wow, this could be pretty significant. But then... Now, before we go to questions, I want to add one correction to my testimony this morning. When Mueller comes back to begin the second half of questioning, he clarifies what he had said. I want to go back to one thing that was said this morning by Mr. Liu, who said, and I quote, you didn't charge the president because of the OLC opinion. That is not the correct way to say it. As we say in the report, and as I said at the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.

Wow. So he completely deflates this entire thing. He basically takes it back. He puts the kibosh on any news that he was going to make. any news that he was going to make. We'll be right back. So, Mike, let's turn to the Republicans. You told us that their goal was to maintain the status quo. Remind us exactly what that is. To get Mueller to reinforce the notion that there was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

So they sort of initially took a similar approach to Nadler and asked Mueller yes or no questions. Is that any true? Your investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russian government in the election interference activity. Volume one, page two, volume one, page 173. Thank you. Yes. Yes. Thank you. That affirmed the most important point to them. Isn't it true the evidence did not establish that the president or those close to him were involved in the charged Russian computer hacking or active measure conspiracies or that the president otherwise had unlawful relationships with any Russian official? Volume 2, page 76. Correct?

I leave the answer to the report. So it was a yes. But they quickly pivoted to a different issue, which they picked at for a fair amount of time. And it turned out to be something a bit surprising. Why don't we have all of this investigation of President Trump that the other side is talking about when you knew that you weren't going to prosecute him? It was, why, Mueller, if you knew you weren't going to indict the president, did you continue with your investigation and produce this massive document with really embarrassing things about Trump and voiced it on the public? You made no decision. You told us this

morning and in your report that you made no determination. So respectfully, director, you didn't follow the special counsel regulations. It clearly says write a confidential report about decisions reached. Nowhere in here does it say write a report about decisions that weren't reached. You wrote 180 pages, 180 pages about decisions that weren't reached, about potential crimes that weren't charged or decided. That kind of reminds me of something that you and I've discussed before, which is how former FBI Director James Comey handled the Hillary Clinton email server episode. He decides not to indict, comes out, gives a press conference, in many people's minds, maligns her. And afterwards,

the question is, aren't you not supposed to do that if you decline to prosecute? Correct. The Republicans are making a decent point about how criminal investigations of our politicians are ended. How should we disclose facts about them? And at the same time, being a bit disingenuous, because when Comey felt he needed to come out and lay out some of the evidence that they had collected in their investigation, the Republicans took that and ran with it to undermine her as a presidential candidate. So now they're outraged that we're looking at the fruits of a criminal investigation in which the central player, the president, has not been charged. And they're complaining about it in a similar fashion to the way that Democrats complain about how Comey handled the Clinton thing. The drafting and the publication of some of the information in this report,

without an indictment, without prosecution, frankly flies in the face of American justice. And I find those facts, this entire process, un-American. It showed that the Republicans were not going to stop at anything to attack Mueller, that they were going to throw every single issue they could come up with, regardless of whether it was an intellectually honest one or not. And that's not maintaining the status quo. That is undermining the special counsel and raising as many questions as possible about his investigation.

Correct. It cut at his motivations in a way that other attacks on the investigation did not. It went directly to Mueller's character and decisions he had made during the investigation. And what was Mueller's response to this? It was similar to many responses he had during this, which was sort of like... Can you give me an example other than Donald Trump, where the Justice Department determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined. I cannot, but this is a unique situation. Okay. I can't agree with that characterization.

All right. You made your point. like part of a larger strategy he was employing to sort of run out the clock, let him say whatever they want, acknowledge it, and move on. Okay, so what else did the Republicans focus on? Not surprisingly, they went back to their greatest hits on the investigation. Most prosecutors want to make sure there's no appearance of impropriety. Most prosecutors want to make sure there's no appearance of impropriety. But in your case, you hired a bunch of people that did not like the president.

And raised questions about whether the investigators were biased. Let me ask you, when did you first learn of Peter Strzok's animus toward Donald Trump? In the summer of 2017. You didn't know before he was hired for your team? Know what? Peter Strzok hated Trump. Okay. You didn't know that before he was made part of your team. Is that what you're saying?

I did not know that. All right. When did you first learn? When I did find out, I acted swiftly to have him reassigned elsewhere. They also picked at continuously. The media first began spreading this conspiracy theory in the spring of 2016, when Fusion GPS, funded by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, started developing the Steele dossier, the document of unverified allegations

about ties between Trump and Russia. Well, what I can tell you is that the events that you are characterizing here now is part of another matter that is being handled by the Department of Justice. Which Mueller had said, I'm not going to talk about. Correct. Well, as again, I'm not going to discuss the issues with regard to Mr. Steele.

It was this persistent effort throughout the entire time, even though at the top of the hearing, he said he would not discuss it. Did your office consider whether the Russian government used Steele's sources to provide Steele with disinformation? Again, I can't speak to that. I understand. I'm asking these questions just for the record, so thanks for your patience.

Mike, you started off by saying that success for the Republicans was maintaining the status quo, which may just be confirming the basic outlines of the Mueller report, especially the fact that there's no criminality. But I wonder if this Republican strategy of focusing on all of these issues that raise questions about the investigation

is a different kind of success for the Republicans because they just kept bringing them up and Robert Mueller didn't really offer much pushback. For the most part, he kind of just seemed to disconnect. I think so in some ways because they knew they would have or they certainly had a person they were questioning who wasn't going to engage and fight and push back that hard. So it gave them the opportunity to sort of create their own soundbites of them giving it to Mueller while he was up there. And to that end, I think that it was successful, although they never really got

Mueller to bite. Mike, what about Mueller and what you said would represent success for him? Did he achieve what he wanted in these hearings? Towards the end of the day. Director Mueller, you've been asked many times this afternoon about collusion, obstruction of justice, and impeachment in the Steele dossier, and I don't think your answers are going to change if I ask you about those questions. So I'm going to...

Congressman Will Hurd of Texas. Ask Mueller. As a former CIA officer, I want to focus on something I think both sides of the political aisle can agree on. That is, how do we prevent Russian intelligence and other adversaries from doing this again? And you see sort of Mueller perk up and begin to really engage on this issue in a way that he hadn't on others. In your investigation, did you think that this was a single attempt by the Russians to get involved in our election, or did you find evidence to suggest they'll try to do this again? No, it wasn't a single attempt. They're doing it as we sit here.

And he sort of gets a chance to ring the alarm bells about interference issues. And they expect to do it during the next campaign. And the Democrats lean into this, and they're able to make something of it. If we could put up slide six. This just came out, WikiLeaks. I love WikiLeaks. Donald Trump, October 10th, 2016. This WikiLeaks stuff is unbelievable.

It's like a treasure trove. Donald Trump, October 31st, 2016. Congressman Quigley from Chicago brings up the fact that Donald Trump praised WikiLeaks. Would any of those quotes disturb you, Mr. Director? I'm not certain I would say. How do you react to that? Well, it's problematic as an understatement in terms of what it displays, in terms of

giving some, I don't know, hope or some boost to what is and should be illegal activity. Congressman Welsh asked Mueller... Have we established a new normal from this past campaign that is going to apply to future campaigns so that if any one of us running for the U.S. House, any candidate for the U.S. Senate, any candidate for the presidency of the United States, aware that a hostile foreign power is trying to influence an election,

has no duty to report that to the FBI or other authorities. I hope this is not the new normal, but I fear it is. And then Chairman Schiff. From your testimony today, I gather that you believe that knowingly accepting foreign assistance during a presidential campaign is an unethical thing to do. And a crime. And a crime. Circumstances, yes. And to the degree that it undermines our democracy and our institutions, we can agree that it's also unpatriotic.

True. And wrong. True. We should hold our elected officials to a standard higher than mere avoidance of criminality, shouldn't we? Absolutely. So this is a different Mueller than we've seen throughout the hearing, and he's definitely stepping outside the four corners of the report. It feels like in those last few exchanges, he's kind of offering clear, tough judgments about the conduct of the president, not in terms of necessarily crimes committed, but just in terms of basic right and wrong.

The report is about an investigation that looks at whether laws are broken. It wasn't looking at questions of patriotism. But there is Mueller, at the end of the day, answering a question about that, about an ideal and a virtue that we have as a country, not about whether a law was broken. And maybe it took him until the end to loosen up and get there, but by the end of the day, you have the person that's overseen this investigation for the past two years calling out this as bad behavior and as a potential problem. And that's not nothing.

Mike, you told us before these hearings that Democrats were determined to get Mueller to bring this report to life and thereby eventually shift public opinion on the president's culpability to counteract the narrative that the president and that the attorney general, Bill Barr, have outlined that Trump did nothing wrong, that this is a witch hunt, this is a waste of time. In the end, given everything you've just laid out, did the Democrats fulfill that mission? I don't think so. Hmm. We'll have to see what the political fallout is and whether it really pushes House members to embrace impeachment.

But we didn't walk out of that hearing today with any major new disclosure about the president's behavior. But I do want to remind you of something you told us the day before the hearing, which is that a realistic form of democratic success, if they were not going to get Robert Mueller to say that the president committed a crime or would have been charged if he weren't president, would be to just get him to affirm that the president's major talking points are false. Was there no obstruction? No.

Was there no collusion? No. Did you exonerate the president? No. And the Democrats did get many different forms of that. And so does that not meet your own threshold for success? Well, I understand. Now I feel like I'm being questioned. But seriously. Now I feel like I'm being questioned. But seriously.

In sort of looking back on that, I don't think in the Trump era we've seen major shifts in people's views of him when he's been shown to lie and mislead the public. So I get that Mueller has more credibility than most, and it does show that the president had been misleading, but I'm not sure it's that powerful to actually change enough minds to drive this in a different direction. So is there a version of this where the Democratic strategy, having not achieved the great moment that they needed to actually change public opinion, have had this backfire. It may backfire in the sense that they went to these great lengths,

they put on this big show, and they didn't walk away with anything major. And so the question becomes, why did you do it? Because this was your idea. This was your hearing. No, no, no, no, no. Not just why did you do it, but why are you continuing to investigate it? So if Mueller came up here, you didn't get any new revelations, the Republicans can stand there and say, well, Democrats, why are you continuing to investigate the president on this? Mueller has done his thing. His report is out. You could move ahead with impeachment if you want to, but politically you don't. So what are you doing? Right.

Either impeach or don't impeach. And then let's stop talking about this. Let's not do like sort of a silent impeachment where we're just trying to dredge up anything we can on the president and we really don't have the political will to go ahead and actually do it. Mike, thank you. Thanks for having me. Director Mueller, thank you again for being here today.

This hearing is adjourned. The Democrats lost so big today, their party is in shambles right now. After the hearings had ended, President Trump addressed reporters from the White House lawn, saying that Mueller's testimony had been a disaster for Democrats and a vindication for him. What he showed more than anything else

is that this whole thing has been three years of embarrassment and waste of time for our country. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday night, the governor of Puerto Rico said he would resign after weeks of massive protests triggered by the release of text messages in which he mocked his own citizens.

The governor, Ricardo Rossello, had resisted stepping down but was undermined by hundreds of thousands of protesters who paralyzed the capital city this week as they demanded his ouster. And after a lengthy investigation, the Federal Trade Commission has ordered Facebook to pay a $5 billion fine and submit to significant federal oversight for violating its users' privacy. The settlement signals a new chapter

in the government's attempts to regulate powerful technology companies. But the commission's five members appeared split about whether the settlement went far enough. The commission's two Democratic members voted against the deal, saying it would not sufficiently change how Facebook operates. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.