The Daily - The Mueller Report Is Released

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

Two years and 448 pages later, a redacted version of the Mueller report has been made public. Here’s what we’ve learned. Guests: Michael S. Schmidt and Mark Mazzetti, who have been covering the special counsel investigation for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.This episode includes disturbing language.Background reading:The Mueller report laid out the scope of Russian election interference and President Trump’s frantic efforts to thwart the special counsel investigation.Read a rundown of what we know so far from the report.Times reporters shared key annotated excerpts from the report.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Okay, Mike. Yeah. I want you to start on page 215, factual results of the obstruction investigation. Today. Sharon, here's what I want you to excerpt.

I want you to start on page 4. Nick, I want you to start at the bottom of page eight. 448 pages. Two years in the making. That's new. We didn't know that. What we learned from the Mueller report. That quote is new.

Pretty good quote. Yeah. It's Friday, April 19th. Michael, can you hear us? Hey, Michael. Yeah. Hey, guys. Hey.

Hey. All right, Mike Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, it's 9.15 on Thursday night. You've both now spent about 10 hours reading the Mueller report. Tell me about this thing. It's a breathtaking document. It's over 400 pages of detailed insights and accounts of enormous issues we've been focused on over the past two years. It's divided into essentially two halves, one for Russia, one for the president's actions in office. In other words, collusion and obstruction. Those are the two buckets. Right. The first half detailing the contact between Russians and Trump advisors isn't enormously revealing in

the sense that we had already heard some weeks ago that there had not been a, quote, criminal conspiracy found by Mueller. At the same time, there's an enormous amount of detail concluding that in the midst of this really historic effort by the Russians to sabotage the election, hacking and leaking of emails, social media manipulation, fake news, it says that the Trump campaign welcomed this. They saw a real benefit of what the Russians were doing, even if at the end of the day, there wasn't an active conspiracy. He's essentially saying that they were interested. They sought out information about emails. They wanted to know more about how they could get their hands on these messages. They welcomed all this, but they never crossed the line into breaking the law.

Just because they sought out the fruits of the Russian hack doesn't mean that they were part of the crime. And just to be very clear, how is what you're describing collectively not collusion? Well, I think we need to be careful because the attorney general said that there was no collusion and the president said there was no collusion. But the Mueller report is more nuanced. And the Mueller report says, you know, this collusion word doesn't really mean anything to us. There's no legal standard of collusion. So what we're going to look at is what is a crime and that is conspiracy. And that's what we have to judge all of this voluminous evidence against. And they said that a conspiracy is two parties acting together in concert to break the law. And what Mueller is very clear about is that there is,

quote, insufficient evidence of a conspiracy. He is not saying there was nothing. He is not saying full exoneration. But he's saying there is insufficient evidence to meet the standard that he had established of a criminal conspiracy, breaking the law. And what would Mueller have needed to see for this to add up to conspiracy? A conversation between the Trump campaign and the Russians where the Trump campaign was saying, hey, guys, can you go break into the DNC and steal some emails so we can then get them out and embarrass the Democrats and help us politically during the campaign? That would have gotten you down the conspiracy path. And they did not find that. Okay, so let's talk about obstruction.

Mike, last time we talked a couple weeks back, Mueller had sent his report to Barr, and Barr had sent a summary of that report to Congress in advance of this full report. And the most confusing thing about that summary was that Mueller had not made a call on whether the evidence added up to obstruction of justice. And today we get to see what Mueller's explanation is for why he didn't make a determination on whether the president broke the law. And it's not clear cut. What it essentially is, is that the president under Justice Department policy cannot be indicted. And because the president cannot be indicted, it's unfair to accuse him while he's in office of breaking the law because there's no way for him to go to court to defend himself. So, dear American public, Mueller essentially says, I am not going to make a determination on that issue. That could be made after the president leaves office. But for now, that would be unfair.

So what I will do is I will lay out for you what I found, what the potential obstruction was, why it may be illegal. And after the president leaves office, the Justice Department could make a determination that he indeed broke the law and bring a case. And at the end of explaining why a determination was not made. Mueller says, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards,

however, we are unable to reach that judgment. So Mueller's basically saying, if we felt comfortable that the president had done nothing wrong, we would tell you. And we are not telling you that. Well, Mike, you mentioned the incidents that he was not going to use as a basis

for charging the president because he felt he couldn't charge the president. What were those that he laid out in the report? Well, there's about a dozen. And they follow in chronological order how Trump misled the public about his relationship with Russia, misled the public about his knowledge that Russia was behind the hacks. And as the presidency goes on, and Mueller's appointed in May of 2017, right after he takes office, the president starts to sort of lose his grip as he tries to maintain control of the investigation. He was intent on using his power as the head of the executive branch to protect himself and use

the tools at his disposal, the people running the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence community, to help protect him from this investigation. And what are some examples of that, specifics? Well, a lot of them are ones that we know well. The firing of James Comey, his efforts to get his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to unrecuse himself from the Russia investigation, essentially reassert his control over something that he has stepped aside from because he has a conflict of interest. And when the president can't get that done, he basically tries to get rid of Sessions

and install a loyalist atop the Justice Department. These are things that have been reported in the press. We get a fuller, richer picture of them, and we really see what the president was saying behind closed doors and the immense pressure he was putting on people to try and use the system to protect himself from the system. But then we learn about incidents that we knew little about, like how the president went completely outside of his administration and government to Corey Lewandowski, his first campaign manager. And he leaned on Corey in the summer of 2017 to try and pressure

Sessions, his attorney general. So here's the president of the United States using someone who doesn't even work for him to get to Sessions and try and get Sessions out there publicly to help clear Trump's name. It's just a remarkable way of using presidential power. Which suggests that the president was meeting resistance within his own administration and therefore reached out to somebody who didn't even work for the government to try to get him to achieve this end. I don't think many in the public will want to hold up the president's aides as heroes, and a lot of them are probably not. But there is a picture here of folks that stopped the president time and time again

and thwarted him from doing things that may have actually gotten him into trouble, that may have crossed that line, that may have made a stronger argument for Mueller about why the president did obstruct justice. One of the most detailed ones is on Trump's efforts to get rid of Mueller and how his White House counsel would not do that. He would not call the Justice Department on the president's behalf and say Mueller has to be removed for what the White House counsel, Don McGahn, thought were some bogus reasons Trump had cooked up about why he didn't like Mueller. And in the document, as Mueller is recounting what happened in this incident, there are Nixonian echoes. It says, on June 17th, 2017, the president called McGahn at home

and directed him to call the acting attorney general and say that the special counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed. McGahn did not carry out the direction, however, deciding that he would resign rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday night massacre, a reference to when Richard Nixon fired the special counsel who was investigating him. I recognize that this question is a little bit meta, but if getting rid of Mueller had meant that the report was never completed, wouldn't that have finally been obstruction of justice? Because literally an investigation was obstructed.

There does seem to be a determination here about the success of the president's efforts or lack of success. That the fact that the Mueller investigation continued and finished means there is less of a case that the president obstructed justice. If there had been more of a Nixonian moment where there was a 18-minute gap in tapes that were deliberately erased, that there was some tangible thing that had happened that had meant that prosecutors couldn't get to the truth, there might possibly have been a different judgment and a different outcome. Right. I keep thinking of that 18-minute deletion when I think about

Don McGahn. It's as if nobody had ever said to Nixon what Don McGahn had said to President Trump. No, I'm not going to delete that tape. Sorry. But that's what Don McGahn did to the president. That's what happened with Trump over and over again. Because everyone has seen all the president's men and they know what happens. And, you know, you don't want to be the guy who carries out the Saturday Night Massacre. So the president really has these people around him to thank in a lot of ways. At the end of the day, there were these folks that were not going to go that extra inch and go over the line for him. And it looks like those measures probably saved him. I mean, Mueller lays this point out explicitly. This is a quote from the report.

The president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or cede to his requests. Comey did not end the investigation of Flynn, which ultimately resulted in Flynn's prosecution and conviction for lying to the FBI. McGahn did not tell the acting attorney general that the special counsel must be removed, but was instead prepared to resign over the president's order. Lewandowski and Dearborn did not deliver the president's message to Sessions that he should confine the Russia investigation to future election meddling only. And McGahn refused to And, like, before seeing this report, our understanding of why Mueller may not have reached a conclusion on obstruction of justice was that obstruction has a lot to do with intent.

Why did the president take the actions that he took? What did we learn from the report about how Mueller might have been thinking about that? been thinking about that. We learned that the president was intent on ending the investigation into himself, but it's less clear about what was truly motivating him. I guess I don't quite understand that. If his intent is to end the investigation, how is that not obstruction of justice? This is the heart of this dispute right now. Yeah. It's a clash of two theories. I mean, Mueller's team clearly indicated that the actions come up to the line of obstruction of justice, that the intent to end the investigation to preserve his presidency does, in fact, approach something that is a criminal obstruction of justice, even if they did not make that determination.

The rub here is that it is at odds with the theory of Robert Mueller's boss, the Attorney General Barr. He got the job of Attorney General, some say, based on his theory that the president can't really obstruct justice. Barr says today in his press conference, President Trump faced an unprecedented situation. As he entered into office and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking

office. At the heart of a obstruction of justice investigation is whether that person has corrupt intent. And his determination is that the president didn't. And in a way, this big debate over the intent of the president, Barr kind of goes out of his way today to fill in the blanks, to sort of say, well, let's look at the president's intent. At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the president's personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was, in fact, no collusion. The president felt that this was consuming his presidency. There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.

Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel's investigation. Yeah, he wanted this thing over. with the special counsel's investigation. Yeah, he wanted this thing over. So in a way, what was one of the things that was so extraordinary about Barr's press conference was that he explains the president's reasoning in a way that the president hasn't himself. So Barr would say that trying to end the investigation

to protect the presidency is not corrupt motive. In fact, in his telling, it's arguably even important, maybe even a little bit noble. It's in the best interest of the American people. Perhaps patriotic. So there's this totally compelling moment in the middle of the report that paints a scene of the president being told that a special counsel had just been appointed. And I'll quote directly from the report. The president slumped back in his chair and said, oh my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked. The president became angry and lambasted the attorney general for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, how could you let this happen, Jeff?

The president said the position of attorney general was his most important appointment and that Sessions had, quote, let him down, contrasting him with Eric Holder and Robert Kennedy. Sessions recalled that the president said to him, you were supposed to protect me, or words to that effect. You were supposed to protect me, or words to that effect. The president returned to the consequences of the appointment and said, everyone tells me if you get one of these independent councils, it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years, and I won't be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me. The way this passage reads is the president's anger about the appointment of a special counsel comes mostly from the recognition that it's going to imperil his presidency. It means nothing will get done.

It means that he's going to spend the rest of his term fighting it. It's not because he's worried that Robert Mueller might find something that will, you know, one day land Donald Trump in jail. That's one reading of this passage that would bolster the argument made by the attorney general that the president faced this extraordinary situation. I don't think that makes any sense, or at least I don't understand it. I don't understand how the attorney general can say there's no issue of an underlying crime here when Donald Trump is sitting there acknowledging the potential threat from the depth and breadth of a special counsel's investigation. He knew at that point in May of 2017 that he had had his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, make hush money payments to women.

Donald Trump was smart enough to know that a special counsel like in Bill Clinton or any other presidency rummages around on one issue and ends up on another. And what happens? Mueller finds these weird transactions. He refers it to another U.S. attorney's office and the president is ultimately

in a completely separate investigation named as an unindicted co-conspirator. How is there not an underlying crime that Donald Trump was afraid about? In July of 2017, myself and two colleagues go into the Oval Office to interview the president. He says, if Mueller looks at my finances, it's crossing a red line. So what were Trump's motivations for getting rid of Mueller? Was he really worried about Russia? Or was he worried that, hey, if this guy rummages around on Russia, he's going to find something else? Indeed, he did. So, Mike, you're saying that Barr's argument that the president is just protecting the presidency doesn't really hold up because we know for a fact that the president understood at this point that when he says, I'm effed, that he has these payments made in coordination with Michael Cohen to these women as hush money, which have nothing to do with the Russia investigation, but which obviously could be incredibly damaging to him

and maybe even criminal. Look, no one has questioned the president about this in a law enforcement setting. I don't know exactly what the president's intentions were, but the idea that there was no underlying criminality in Donald Trump's life in May of 2017 when Mueller got appointed is bogus because there was.

Further, in December of 2017, there's a report out there that Mueller has subpoenaed the president's bank records. Before the president's lawyers are able to get the message to him that the report is wrong, he starts telling White House aides that Mueller has to go. I do think there's a decent case to be made that there were underlying issues of criminality within his life. The Justice Department has said that itself. Okay, so regardless of the president's intent, is it important whether or not he was when you looked at the investigation, the efforts that the president took did not significantly damage the inquiry.

Despite the president's best efforts, he was not very good at obstructing justice. Right. The existence of the Mueller report today suggests that the investigation did not get obstructed. Despite all of Donald Trump's huffing and puffing and trying to get this person to do this and this person to do that, Bob Mueller moved ahead unimpeded for two years, finished his investigation, and the entire country got to see the fruits of it. Show us where the obstruction is, is what the president's defenders would say. We'll be right back. So finally, I want to talk about Bill Barr's role in all this, because the position of many Democrats today was that Barr, in reaching a decision on obstruction of justice,

where Mueller did not, in holding a press conference ahead of the report's release, seeming to defend the president, all taken together has undermined any credibility that he had, and that Democrats and the country need to see for themselves what Mueller had found. How are you thinking about Barr in this moment, having now spent time with the Mueller report? I mean, the one thing is clear is that, you know, this has been a lot of red meat for Democrats in Congress to keep investigating. And one of the things that they're going to keep investigating is Barr's role in this entire process. They are going to try to get him up to testify.

They're going to try to get him up to testify. They're going to try to get more underlying documents in the Mueller investigation. They now see Barr as a clear target for them. I think a lot of people, because of all these actions, have a much different picture of the attorney general than they did a month or two ago. And they're going to try to understand the differences between what Bob Mueller thinks about all this, the supposedly nonpartisan figure, and what Bill Barr thinks about this, the presidential appointee whose allegiances are clearly closer to the president.

There's one answer to this, and that is that after this entire investigation in which Bob Mueller has said nothing publicly, including today when there was a press conference held to talk about his report, we need to hear from Bob Mueller. We need for him to explain to us more how they came to this determination

that they couldn't say whether the president violated the law or not. Does Mueller think that Barr has misrepresented some of his findings? What was his relationship with the Justice Department? Did he believe that Congress should deal with this issue and that Barr shouldn't have made a call on whether the president violated the law. We need to hear from Mueller. We have never heard his voice in the past two years. So inadvertently, in seeming to protect the president and not be representing Mueller,

Bill Barr may be extending Democrats' interest in this investigation and the trouble for the president. Absolutely. If you look back at what Barr's done in the last month, this could have turned out differently for him. If he had put out the report immediately after the letter or soon after the letter, as he could have, if he had characterized the report differently in that four page letter, and if he hadn't had a press conference on the day of the release before anyone had seen the report that had this appearance of trying to spin it for the president and protect the president.

That seems to have created more problems, both for Barr and the president, than if they had just released the report. Mark, thank you very much. Mike, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for having us. The Daily is made by Theo Balcom, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnik, Michaela Bouchard, Stella Tan, Julia Simon, and Samantha Hennig. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.