The Daily - Special Edition: A Guide to the Mueller Hearings

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, will testify before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee beginning at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday. We spoke to our colleague about what to expect. 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: Read more about what you need to know before the testimony.Here are 19 lingering questions for Mr. Mueller, along with what we know or don’t know about the answers.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Special Counsel Robert Mueller will testify before two House committees tomorrow. Mike Schmidt on what to expect. It's Tuesday afternoon, July 23rd. It's Tuesday afternoon, July 23rd. Hey, I think we could probably, um, we could probably think about opening up the line. It's open. Hey!

How are you? I'm good. I'm good. It's been a while. I missed you. I know. I gotta figure out how to use this thing. I knew that your response to I miss you would be not that you missed me. You were emotionally avoidant. Here we go. This is daily has now become therapy. Okay, Mike Schmidt. So we are gathered here today because it's the eve of the Mueller testimony.

Yeah. In many other circumstances, if we were going to hear from the person who was in charge of an investigation, it would be a huge deal. Mm-hmm. But there are some factors here that have taken a lot of the air out of it. Like what?

One is Attorney General Bill Barr by announcing initially that the president had not broken the law and having the report come out many weeks later really made it harder for the Democrats to then take the report and run with it when it came out. The second thing is that Mueller has been told by the Justice Department that he is only to speak about the contents of his report. He has to stay within the four corners of the document. He can't get into internal deliberations about his office or discussions about the rationale for the decisions they made. Third is that we're so far removed from the release of the report.

The public has already consumed as much of the report as they're probably going to. And the Democrats have determined they can only really take this so far and have avoided impeachment proceedings. And now it's time to hear from the guy who led the investigation. Wow, you're really building this up, this denouement anti-climax of yours. Well, the Democrats have really wanted to hear from Mueller himself. And it was clear from Mueller's body posture and then the press conference he had in the weeks after the report that he did not want to testify. he had in the weeks after the report that he did not want to testify. When he held the press conference, he said, look, you guys can call me up there, but I'm not going to say anything beyond

what I have already said in the report. So instead of us building here towards a climactic event where the investigator is going to come down and really lay things out, we already probably know many of the facts that will be resuscitated tomorrow. Is resuscitated the right word? I think that's right. You resuscitate some... Revived? Reinforced? Recreated? We already know many of the facts that will be restated tomorrow. The difference here and what Democrats are hoping is that the simple fact of Mueller talking about this publicly resonates differently with the public than the report did.

the report did. Someone sitting there talking about the report, does that reach people in a way that the document did not? Right. And not just someone, Robert Mueller. Correct. The person who the country has obsessed about for the past two years. But why has it taken so long to get Mueller up there? Why has it been almost exactly four months since Mueller delivered the report to Attorney General Barr that we're finally hearing from him? I think that Democrats at first were concerned about subpoenaing him and what the optics of that may look like. And I think that Mueller had initially said he didn't want to do this. So did Democrats want to look like they were strong arming the investigator up to the hill to testify when he's been on the record saying, hey, guys, if you call me up there, I'm not going to go beyond my report, so it's probably not worth it.

So this issue sort of languished on and on and on, and the Democrats went out and they tried to get other witnesses to come and testify, and then eventually they decided to subpoena Mueller, and Mueller agreed to comply. Okay, let's talk about what we're expecting to actually happen on Wednesday. Given what we know about Mueller's reluctance to testify, given the instructions from the Justice Department and Mueller's own signals that everything he has to say, he has poured into the actual report. What would success look like for the Democrats, Mueller would come out and say that if Trump was not the president, he would have been indicted. Now, the chances of that are highly unlikely. But Mueller essentially asserting that the president did break the law would be a potential game changer. In a more realistic expectation mindset, I would say that Democrats hope that Mueller can animate the report to the point that it resonates differently with the American public. Basically kind of voicing the audiobook version of his report. Correct. Is the audiobook enough to move the public in the direction of impeachment? Or to a lesser extent, is the audiobook enough to politically

impact the president with the American public? Does it resonate with voters and help the Democrats build a narrative coming into the 2020 campaign? So running with this metaphor, give me an example of a chapter that might be powerful to hear read aloud by Mueller from the report during this hearing. So as an obstructionist, myself, someone who has followed the obstruction story,

I think that hearing Mueller talk about how the president tried to pressure Don McGahn, the White House counsel, to recant on what he told Mueller's investigators could be potentially powerful because it shows the president trying to tamper with a witness and doing something that the average person may understand as obstruction of justice. I have to say, I'm a little bit distracted. Are there other obstructionists, or is this kind of an academic field of one?

I always say that my colleague Mark Mazzetti is a collusionist. He spent all of his time on collusion. You on obstruction. And I'm an obstructionist, an obstructionist guy. I'm not obstructionist. I have not gotten in the way of the investigation, I don't think. Right, right. Legally.

Ahead of the hearing, some notable figures who are central to the investigation have suggested some lines of questioning that they think the Democrats should follow in the service of the party's goals in these hearings. Jim Comey, for example, the former head of the FBI, who's firing by the president, was a focus of the Mueller investigation. He published a whole list of questions for the Democrats to ask. I wonder if you could read some of those. Did you find that there were a series of contacts between the Trump campaign and individuals with ties to the Russian government? In particular, did you find that a Trump foreign policy advisor learned that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails? Did you find that the Trump foreign policy advisor said that the Trump campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton? By the way, that's the best.

That's the best one. The first ones are kind of weak. Okay, those are questions from volume one of the Mueller report. What about those are collusion questions, right? What about obstructionist questions from Volume 2? Volume 2. Did you reach a judgment as to whether the president had committed obstruction of justice crimes? Did you find substantial evidence that the president had committed obstruction of justice crimes?

For example, did you find that the president directed the White House counsel to call the acting attorney general and tell him the special counsel must be removed? It sounds like these are questions whose answers would be either yes or no, and that seems to be the goal, just to get simple yes or no answers. Correct, but sure, simple, but potentially explosive. Did you believe the president broke the law? A yes to that question is a game changer.

Mm-hmm. But if Mueller sticks to the instructions, we're not going to hear those answers. He will not offer yes or no answers to those questions.

The instructions would stop him from doing that. Well, let's play this out. Mm-hmm. So if Mueller's following the instructions and they ask him, did you reach a judgment

as to whether the president had committed obstruction of justice crimes, Mueller's answer to that, based on the report, is that they did not make a traditional prosecutorial decision about the president. They simply collected evidence and looked at the questions of law around that because they didn't think it was fair to accuse the president of breaking the law because he wouldn't have a chance to clear his name. I mean, I'm being facetious,

but during your answer, I basically nodded off. Is what you're saying, that Mueller is going to offer a prosecutorial, complicated, non-colloquial answer to these questions, and therefore the idea that you're going to get an explosive yes or a satisfying no is unlikely. No, but that has been the issue over the past four months. The issue we just discussed about why is it that Mueller didn't accuse the president of breaking the law is a very difficult one to understand. And it's at the heart of the report.

difficult one to understand. And it's at the heart of the report. And I can see why many Americans struggled to get their heads around that or nodded off. Does that suggest that this is a potentially flawed approach for Democrats to take the Comey list of questions? Well, I'm not sure because the goal by the Democrats is basically to get Mueller to say something and certainly to, at the very least, recite what's in the report. So yes or no questions could be difficult for them because a yes or no answer may not illuminate things that much. But at the same time, Mueller can't answer these questions yes or no without violating the rules. Okay, then there are the questions from Neil Katyal, who you've interviewed for The Daily, I've interviewed for The Daily, and who wrote the rules

that govern how the special counsel investigation was carried out. Can you read a few of Neal's questions? First, did your report find there was no collusion? Second, did your report find there was no obstruction? Third, did your report give the president complete and total exoneration? It feels to me like what Katyal's questions are getting at are the words that President Trump uses in defense of himself. No collusion, no obstruction. I've been completely and totally exonerated. And from my reading, Katyal's questions are an attempt to get Mueller to be in a bit of a public spat with the president, to be on the other side of those questions and to say the way he's characterizing those are wrong without necessarily saying it that way. Correct. The president's talking points in the aftermath of the investigation have been no collusion, no obstruction. I was totally

exonerated. And if you have Mueller, someone who is trusted saying things that directly contradict the president, could that move the needle? So this strategy, Mike, is slightly more ambitious than Comey's. Not just reiterate what's in the report, but to hear Robert Mueller say that the way Trump talks about his investigation is wrong. You can see the Democratic strategist trying to come up with the ad where there's a clip of Trump saying no collusion and Mueller saying I didn't make a determination on that. You can see the clip of Trump saying I was totally exonerated and Mueller saying I did not exonerate the president using the two of them to face off against each other to show that the president has been misleading about the report. And what about you, Mike? What question would you be most interested to hear the Democrats asking Mueller? I mean, this all comes down to did they

think the president broke the law? And to know whether Mueller thought the president broke the law would certainly provide some clarity to this situation. I think I'd want to hear the Democrats ask for a more detailed explanation for why they chose to not accuse the president of breaking the law. To try and allow Mueller to illuminate on that, expand on it, and help us understand it better. And you'd like to hear Mueller answer it. Yeah. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. So, Mike, you just outlined what success might look like for the Democrats in their hearings with Robert Mueller.

What about Republicans? What does success look like for them? To maintain the status quo. And I wonder what that looks like in a hearing where they have almost equal time to Democrats in asking questions. I think that there are sort of two strains on the Republican side. One is the strain of the Tea Party folks who have been itching to question Mueller for the past two years. They are going to ask questions about the text messages by Strzok and Page. The former FBI agents who the president says

showed a bias against him. Why did you hire so many Democrats? Why did you hire so many people who had given money to Hillary Clinton? Were you favorable to Comey because we think he's your best friend? This is their chance to finally face off with Mueller. And I find it hard to believe that they're not going to take a shot at just having the clip of them asking those questions. So direct all their attention to possible bias in the investigation,

not the findings of the investigation. And so in a sense, not just maintain status quo, but deepen skepticism of Mueller and his investigation among their constituents.

I just think it's going to be very hard for them to avoid that, especially when they've beat that drum so hard. The other strain that the Republicans are going to want to hit on

is the overarching conclusion of the report, which was that there was no criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia. And to get Mueller to say that, because this is the question that's hung over Trump since he won. And the Republicans in the document have Mueller saying that there was no criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia. So why not get the person who led the investigation to say that? This person who they have accused of being on a witch hunt has cleared the president and his campaign on the biggest question of the 2016 election.

Right, so it's like the reverse democratic strategy. Get the most powerful voice possible to animate the report in ways that benefit the president. Correct. And what about Robert Mueller himself? What would success look like to him in these hearings? the report to walk out of there simply reciting what is in the document. I don't think he wants to be drawn into discussing the internal deliberations of his office. And I think if he walks out of there having just simply gone over what he's already put out there, for him, that'll be a win. Right. His goal is kind of to be boring.

Yeah, it's certainly, he's done a decent job at that for the past two years. So this hearing could be quite boring. And if it is, that will have been by Mueller's design. Correct. If that's what happens, is this kind of officially the final death blow for the Democrats when it comes to any meaningful consequences for the Mueller report on the Trump presidency? Well, if Mueller doesn't move the needle, then I think it's going to take a fairly significant disclosure about something else that we don't know about to really galvanize the Democrats to do something. I think that if

Mueller sticks to the report and is not providing juicy soundbites for the Democrats, then this will sort of be where it is now. And the Democrats will put their hopes on the 2020 election. Because impeachment is basically dead. It'll be a hill too steep to climb. Mike, thank you. We will talk to you once these hearings are over tomorrow. Thanks for having me. That's it for now.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.