The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jeffrey Toobin Explores Donald Trump’s “True Crimes and Misdemeanors”

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

The Mueller Report documented enough crimes and scandals in Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign and in his Administration to sink the career of any President before him. But Trump called the whole thing a win. What’s more, he is now running for reëlection—something no impeached President has ever done before. How did that happen? And why? David Remnick discusses these questions with The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, whose new book, “True Crimes and Misdemeanors,” is an account of the investigation and impeachment of Donald Trump. 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.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The impeachment of Donald Trump was just six months ago. Not six years, not six decades. Pretty much the only thing that might have made us forget the Mueller investigation and the drama of impeachment was the worst global pandemic in a century. It hit us just weeks after the Senate voted to acquit and the nation just moved on to other crises. But Jeffrey Tubin asks us to pause and consider the details and the outrages of that prolonged period in his new book, True Crimes and Misdemeanors. It's a thorough account of this astonishing piece of political history. Jeff Tubin is a longtime staff writer and a legal analyst for CNN, and relevant to the matter at hand, before his career in journalism, Tubin was a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn. Jeffrey, you start your book with a scene, the first and only meeting that we know of between.

Donald Trump and Robert Mueller. Why start there and what was it like? Well, I found that face-off kind of irresistible, both journalistically and substantively, May 16th, 2017, the week after James Comey was fired by the president as FBI director. And as with so much, this meeting became a subject of controversy. Donald Trump has repeatedly said that, Mueller came to the White House to lobby to become the FBI director again, to sort of beg for his job back, as Trump tweeted. That, of course, is a total, total lie. And that, to me, is a good metaphor for just sort of the nature of the difference between Mueller and Trump. But what was Mueller actually there for? Mueller was there because Rod Rosenstein, who was the Deputy Attorney General, had sought him out for advice

on who the next FBI director should be and what kind of qualities the president should be looking for. Mueller could not even have served as FBI director even if he wanted to because there is a federal law that limits the tenure of FBI directors. He got an extension for two years, but that had expired. So the notion that Mueller wanted or even could get his job back was preposterous, but that never stopped Trump from making this claim. So Mueller was there sort of bewildered by the encounter because Trump didn't even really seem to know why he was there. And as is the case with most meetings with Donald Trump,

as I have heard, as many of us have heard, Trump did almost all the talking. So he talked about his victory over Hillary Clinton and how popular he was. and Mueller said very little. He did say, I think you should pick someone from outside the bureau. That was, you know, the one piece of advice you should get. He should pick an outsider.

But I thought this confrontation in the Oval Office was a revealing window into the characters of the two people who would wind up as the protagonists in my book. What's so amazing about the book's portrayal of Mueller and his team is that if you think back a couple of years ago, and if you were to watch, you know, MSNBC or something, or even CNN, and you would watch this incredible valorization of Robert Mueller, American action hero, apolitical, truth teller, nothing but the facts, ma'am. And he was going to be the savior. And when you look at the reality of it, the failure, the coming up short, and quite frankly at the end, Mueller's completely unimpressive public face, it's really astonishing.

There is an Emperor's New Clothes quality to it. I think people got Mueller wrong from the beginning, though. I think, you know, the MSNBC people, the people with the Mueller-time t-shirts, the people with the Robert Mueller action figures, you know, they, they... You're not going to include CNN on that? Well, I mean, certainly there was a... CNN had a diverse cast, and there were... were certainly people on CNN who thought Mueller was going to be the avenging angel of truth and justice.

But Mueller saw himself, and I think many prosecutors see themselves, and I think this is something that people outside the legal system don't really get, is that many prosecutors see themselves with very limited missions, identify specific criminal acts, prosecute them, but if you don't do that, shut up and go home. Muller, I think, you know, and I don't want to overstate how familiar I am with Mueller's thinking, but I think every time, you know, the media created him as someone who was going to bring down the president, that made him cling even more closely to his narrow mandate of identifying crimes, but that's it. Now, what did Mueller actually find? What were his concrete findings that in your view, and you make this very plain in the book, you think

we're incredibly damning. Let me go straight to the most important, which is Trump committed repeated acts of criminal obstruction of justice. You know, the crimes that got Richard Nixon forced from office in light of certain impeachment and conviction. The crimes that got Bill Clinton impeached were less obvious, less dramatic, and less provable than the ones that are right there in the Mueller report. His repeated attempts to get his White House counsel to fire Mueller, his attempts to get the White House counsel to lie about his interactions, his attempts to get Jim Comey to go easy on Michael Flynn, those acts. are classic obstruction of justice, and A, Mueller should have said so, and B, Congress should have

acted on them. And yet he was accused of not drawing enough of a bright line under these accusations and findings in the report as he could have. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I totally agree with that. What could he have done otherwise? Basically, what Mueller said was, in light of the Justice Department policy that says, can't indict a sitting president, a policy I happen to agree with. I am not going to reach a firm conclusion about whether Trump committed a crime because Trump would not have the opportunity to reply in a courtroom. And I think that was a completely bogus gift to Donald Trump because it gave him two benefits. A, he can't be indicted. And B, you can't say whether he should be indicted. I thought

it was, you know, a dereliction of duty, especially given the strength of the evidence against Trump. And it allowed Bill Barr to gloss over and mislead the public about what Mueller really found. Now, in the aftermath of the report, time and time again, Donald Trump would go to the microphones and say it was a hoax, no collusion, no collusion, no collusion. Did Donald Trump in fact collude with Russia to win the 2016 election, or is he right? You know, I have to say I think he's more right than wrong about that. The argument that Donald Trump, you know, made a knowing agreement with Vladimir Putin, I think is false. It just didn't happen.

Now, what makes the story, frankly, more complicated and more interesting, is that Trump wanted to collude. He was happy that Putin was assisting. And one of the things I lay out in the book, which I think people don't realize, is just how extensive the Russian effort was, whether it was the social media campaign run out of the Internet research agency in St. Petersburg or the hacking that went on through Russian military intelligence. There was this enormous effort on the part of Russia. And you had things like the meeting in Trump Tower in June of 2016,

with a Russian lawyer hoping to get information. That meeting does not lead to anything further. But the idea that there might have been more extensive collusion than that was certainly plausible and certainly worthy of investigation and revealed unsavory behavior on the part of the president and his team. But there was no meeting of the minds. and collusion, if you're going to be fair, implies some sort of agreement. And there was no agreement as far as I was aware. Jeffrey Tubin's new book, Is True Crimes and Misdemeanors. We'll continue in a moment.

Jeffrey, the Mueller report dropped in April of 2019. And just a few months later, we were launched into yet another presidential scandal, one that eventually led to Trump's actual impeachment. Did Trump collude with Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election? Absolutely, absolutely. You know, one of the pleasures of writing this book was to show how this was not two scandals. It was one scandal. It was not just an overlapping cast of characters.

It was an overlapping MO, collusion and obstruction, except this time there was collusion. And the difference between Donald Trump in 2016 and Donald Trump in 2009, was that he was president of the United States and he had the power to collude and he had the power to lean on a foreign country to get him help. So what if any crimes did Donald Trump commit when it comes to Ukraine?

You know, I think he didn't commit a criminal offense. What he did commit was an impeachable offense. You know, if you look at the history of impeachable, You know, what the framers were most concerned about was not whether a president violated some specific federal statute, largely because there were none at the time of the case. But what they cared about was abuse of power. That was the core issue that Hamilton, Madison J., the Federal newspapers were all talking about. And if you look at what Trump did with regard to Ukraine, he took what, you know, is perhaps the most. important power that a president has, which is the conduct of foreign policy. And he put it to use

entirely for the benefit of his pre-election campaign. And that to me was the definition of an impeachable offense. Do you think that the Mueller report or impeachment will have any effect whatsoever on the 2020 election? It's disappeared awful quickly, don't you think? Yeah. I mean, it is. Let's be frank, Jeff. You've worked your head off on this book about a long investigation and series of events of enormous historical importance, and yet we can barely remember it through the haze of what we've been through these last several months. I tell you, David, you know, occasionally I have to pinch myself and say, you know when Donald Trump was acquitted in the Senate?

In February, it's now August. It's not exactly like the War of the Roses. I mean, this is months ago. Look, I mean, I follow the news. I participate in making the news. It strikes me that one thing you never hear from Joe Biden is, oh, by the way, the other guy, he was actually impeached. That's usually kind of considered a big deal. Why is this? Why isn't this more of an issue? You know, I think one of the successes that Trump had and his lawyers had was turning. this scandal in particular into just another thing Democrats and Republicans fight about, like just this sort of entirely partisan affair, that it had no moral or legal content separate

from everyday politics. Jeffrey, what lasting meaning will the Mueller report and the impeachment drama mean for future presidents? Well, I think it really depends on. the results of the election in November. I think, you know, if Donald Trump gets reelected, it means that the use of political power for entirely personal and political gain will be ratified and will be sanctioned and will be repeated.

If he loses, I think it will mean that Trump's current. corruption and personal immorality and amorality were simply too much for this country. And that's what's really on the ballot in November. I think the verdict here will not be rendered by me. It's not going to be, it wasn't rendered by the Senate and the House. The verdict will be rendered by the voters. Jeffrey Tubin, thank you so much. Jeffrey Tubin's new book is True Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Investigation of Donald Trump.

You can find all of Jeff's writing for the New Yorker. at New Yorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thank you for joining us today. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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