The New Yorker Radio Hour - Has the Mueller Report Changed Anything?

Episode Date: March 29, 2019

The Mueller investigation has been a two-year obsession for nearly everyone who cares about politics in America. For one side, the special counsel was a bête noire, a leader of a witch hunt; for the other, Mueller was a deus ex machina who would end the political disruptions of Trumpism. But the report received by Attorney General William Barr was highly ambivalent, neither indicting nor exonerating the President, and leaving to the A.G. to decide the crucial question of obstruction of justice. To weigh the consequences of the Mueller report, David Remnick sat down with the staff writers Masha Gessen and Susan Glasser. “Any other political figure of course would be glad that an investigation like this is over, and would want to move on as quickly as possible,” Glasser notes. “True to form, [Trump] is already talking about various vindictive moves, and ‘investigating the investigators.’ . . . It’s a strategy compatible with his overall approach of appealing to his supporters, and maximum divisiveness.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For two years, both sides have looked to the Mueller investigation with real obsessiveness. For Republicans and defenders of the president, Mueller was their bet noir, the walking incarnation of an establishment that had it out for Donald Trump. A witch hunt the president called it, over and over. For Democrats, Mueller was a kind of deus ex machina, a god who would descend and make it all right, who would report and reveal everything and somehow forced Donald Trump from office. Not everyone was expecting the ambivalence of the document that Mueller delivered. There were no new indictments, but nor did it completely exonerate the president.

And the document also punted to the Attorney General on the crucial question of obstruction of justice. So after two years of obsession, where are we? What happens now in Washington? I put those questions to staff writers Susan Glasser and Masha Gessen. Masha, you've been warning about two big things for almost two years. On the one hand, you've been arguing that Donald Trump is every bit as bad as his worst critics say. You've even used the word totalitarian to describe him, which is a, which is, well, he would be if he could be, yes. if he had the skills and he had the system to back him up.

On the other hand, you've been warning that the notion of collusion was a kind of fantasy that you couldn't really see as a possibility. Am I being accurate in that summary? Yeah, I mean, obviously, I haven't known, and we still don't fully know, although there's credible indication that collusion wasn't found by the person who could have found it. I think that what I've been more concerned with is that this idea that the Mueller report would come out.

And suddenly this nightmare would be over because we would discover that Trump had come from outer space or at least from Russia and would somehow be disappeared by the secret being revealed. Right. I mean, there's a lot of magical thinking in that process. And I think that what has really bothered me is that engaging in that magical thinking happens at the expense of looking at Trump as an American phenomenon. But don't we talk about that also? I don't know why one excludes the other. The riddle for so many people is if, in fact, there was no collusion, then why did Donald

Trump lie the way that he did? why did he behave the way he did? Why did his aides take these meetings, these constant meetings? It didn't raise any suspicion in your mind? Did you actually think that, well, Putin's not such a Superman, and he's incapable of putting together such a kind of master plan out of a cheap novel? That's exactly right. I mean, and I think that that's, and I'm not alone in this, a lot of Russian journalists and Russia specialists have been saying, you know, you're, you're overestimating these guys. That was the critique I always got from my liberal Russian friends, or lots of them who are involved in journalism, is that you're made so crazy by Trump that you're overestimating the capacity for this kind of fantastical collusion to happen. Exactly. I mean, what we are seeing, us Russians, when we're looking at this picture, is we see a bunch of hustlers, all of whom are trying to sell something to both sides, right? They're trying to sell Putin on the idea of creating an American president.

They're trying to sell an American campaign, marginal American campaign as far as we could sell at a certain point, right, on the idea that they have some special connection to the Kremlin. And then we see a bunch of naive Americans going, oh, that's the secret. Right. It's like the idiot theory of collusion. It's not a master plan. You're surrounded by people like Roger Stone and Papadopoulos and all these other third-rate people. But on the other hand, you have his, Paul Manafort is doing incredibly secretive business, criminal business. And he's running the campaign.

So you can see why the suspicions were heightened. Yes. And I have to say. And real corruption. Over the course of those two years, especially when Manafort was arrested, I thought, well, maybe I was wrong. Yeah. I started hedging my bets. Now, Susan, even prominent Democratic members of Congress were speculating on television.

about collusion for months and months and months. And they were using language that went far beyond the notion of suspicious and why the lies and so on. They were saying definitely collusion. Adam Schiff is still saying it. Correct. And I think that it goes to this uncertainty that hangs over everything. And again, you can't condemn this process enough, it seems to me. It's done such a disservice.

I mean, you know, first of all, if Trump really is vindicated, then how can you? can they not want this report out? Because right now it doesn't have the credibility of even understanding what the argument is. Because what is collusion? It seems to me that, you know, Adam Schiff's version of collusion is different than Donald Trump's version of collusion. And we don't know what Mueller's version is. It appears that he's taken a fairly narrow interpretation of his mandate. Did Donald Trump cooperate and essentially, you know, sign up as an agent of the Russian military intelligence, the GRU. And in that sense, he clearly has found the answer to be no. I think a lot of people who have looked at this closely, people who are Russia experts never thought that that would

be the case. And if that's the definition of collusion, you won't find a ton of people who were out there making that argument. You know, the question of a different kind of Trump campaign collaboration with the Russian effort on his behalf, I think, is much more where you see people who've been out there looking at evidence that's already on the public record and saying it's very suspicious. Because there, you do have a very documented record of not only the Russian efforts to interact with the campaign and this whole cast of characters that they're reaching out to and pinging and pinging during 2016, you have number one, Trump and Manifort, appearing to commit to the Russian's top foreign policy priority, which was lifting of sanctions on Russia.

That is a significant foreign policy engagement with Russia and its agents. So again, there are enormous questions that if they are not put to rest, I think will simply undermine the credibility of Mueller's report. And Mueller, of course, is a man who both Democrats and Republicans for years have held. in the highest regard. It's his integrity alone at this point that is essentially guaranteeing these findings since we don't have the information. Maja, a lot of the aftermath of this release of the four-page letter has been criticism of the press. Famously, Matt Taibi, a Rolling Stone writer, said that this is the WMD of our day, the failure to get the WMD story, despite large protests all around the world, the failure of the mainstream media with some

with some exceptions, that as big a disaster as that was, what's going on now, what happened for the last two years is an equal disaster. Do you agree with that? I don't know how helpful that peril is. I mean, I think that the ongoing obsession with the Mueller investigation has been distracting and in a sense destructive to the political conversation because of the expectation of the magic bullet, but also because of the way...

Do you think there should never have been a special prosecutor? Not at all. No, I don't think that there shouldn't have been a special prosecutor. But I think that the obsession should have been toned on. I think that the problem with covering an investigation like this, and now we're seeing this sort of in full bloom, right, is that you're always reliant on anonymous sources. you're relying on leaks from intelligence officers, each of whom has an agenda and a narrative

that you don't have access to. And in that sense, it is quite similar to WMD, right? I just think that it's happening in a different political situation. And as I listened to Susan, I was thinking back to Orwell's quote, that even to understand double-think, you have to engage in double-think. I have that brain-breaking sense about this, because this investigation into Trumpism is so infected by Trumpism that we can't get our brains around it. I mean, the fact that we have an Attorney General that you can't put trust in because you have to point out that is a handpick Attorney General,

the fact that the leaks that have defined this presidency are the story. Well, another factor is that the most triumphant day in the Trump, presidency has been the news seemingly that he is not an agent or influence in some way from Russia. And then we don't even know what the news is. There is that. Let me ask you this. Steve Bannon, Susan, Steve Bannon, who was a very important strategist for the 2016 victory for Trump, now says that Trump is going to weaponize the results of the Mueller report for the 2020 campaign, Will that be a successful strategy? Well, look, I mean, you know, this is where Trump blowing up the conventions of our politics is still an ongoing thing.

Any other political figure, of course, would be glad that an investigation like this is over and would want to move on as quickly as possible. You now see prominent Republicans supporters of Trump, essentially begging him publicly, as Senator Kennedy from Louisiana did the other day, just to shut up about it. and move on. Now, what do we all know about Trump's character at this point? The odds of him shutting up about anything and moving on are very, very slim. And true to form, he's already talking about, you know, various vindictive moves and investigate the investigators and, you know, his advisors are demanding that Schiff be removed from his chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee. And so it wouldn't surprise me if this is a strategy that the president wishes to pursue. Again, it's a strategy that, is very compatible with his overall approach of appealing to his own supporters and to maximum divisiveness in American politics. Has Barr's summary affected Trump's poll ratings at all? Well, there was just one poll out this morning that I saw so far, which suggested that the answer to that is no. But still, I have to say, his odds of being reelected are substantial, don't you think? Both of you? I do.

Yes. Masha, you recently wrote of the Mueller report, at least what we know of it so far, that we've overlooked a lot of things, that we've been so obsessed with the Mueller process, which was mainly done in secret. What has been lost? What have we not been talking about enough? And what is the necessary reset politically, intellectually, in terms of what the media should be examining and thinking about? Well, you know, I had this very strange moment last week. week, I happened to be in Leipzig at the opening of the book fair in Leipzig. And I was told it was going to be seated in the front row. And I was warned that it was going to be a long evening

because there were going to be five political speeches before the writers got to speak. And your heart sank. My heart sank because I just flew in. I'm going to fall asleep in the front row. And then these people started going up. And each one, of them gave a speech that was substantive, that was urgent. They all talked about things that were clearly on everybody's mind, like the crisis of the European project and the rise of the populist right in Europe and the importance of the written word and the storytelling at a time like this. And I thought, oh my God, these people are speaking and they're addressing the public

sphere as though it mattered. And didn't that used to happen in the United States? Just fairly recently. And, you know, I'm not, I'm not claiming that we were living in Democratic Paradise, and then all of a sudden Donald Trump came and broke all our toys. I mean, I think their political conversation has been in decline for quite some time. But I think there's a kind of leap into the abyss that somehow we missed. But hang on. Really? I mean, how much ink was spilled and pixels created and even broadcast discussion about the authoritarian nature of Donald Trump, about the many bureaucracies that he's degraded in a reactionary direction, about his effect on climate change, or any number of issues.

Have we really ignored these? No, I don't think we've ignored them. I think, you know, I've seen this movie before. And to... Meaning what? Which movie? Meaning the sort of the degradation of politics. In Russia or here?

In Russia. And I think what happens is that you get very scared because something happens and then, you know, the sun rises the next day. That's what normalization means. That is exactly what normalization. It's the boiling frog. It's the boiling frog syndrome. But, you know, all of us are participants in this process. And I think my dream is that instead of writing an ongoing.

story about the Mueller investigation that consists of connecting the dots on a daily basis and trying to put together leaks on a daily basis, I wish we're writing this story on a daily basis. What I think is missing is an ongoing narrative. It's a much harder narrative to construct. I don't know how you make it interesting on a daily basis. Susan? Well, I mean, look, Masha, I'm very sympathetic on the one hand to the idea that there has been this

almost a feeling of like this is some kind of crazy bad dream. This isn't American politics. As I know, you know, many people when you talk to them, right, they articulate this idea like every morning I have to wake up and check myself, you know, is this really happening in America? So I understand that there was an element of a sort of Mueller redemption fantasy. But if you actually look at, you know, the coverage, that is not really what was at the heart of the very good, I think. And I think, think, and very important reporting on this, I think that we have been covering this as an ongoing unrolling of Trump's challenges to our core institutions and to, you know, essentially basic norms of democracy, right? I mean, that is the ongoing daily drama of the Trump

presidency. And because the Mueller investigation was mostly in secret, in fact, it wasn't that we were covering, say, public hearings a la Iran-Contra in lieu of covering. Covering, those daily extraordinary things from Trump. I do think that we are accommodating ourselves to extraordinary changes in our political system that are more significant than people like to believe. In many ways, I find as worrisome the current notion, well, our institutions have held, you know,

it'll snap back whenever he leaves. I find that narrative as worrisome as the kind of Mueller's going to save us narrative, which I actually think is a little bit of a straw man. Susan Glasser and Masha Gesson, both staff writers at The New Yorker. You can find everything they've written on Trump, Russia, Mueller, you name it, at New Yorker.com. And I'm David Remnick. That's the show for today. I want to thank you for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time.

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