The NPR Politics Podcast - Key Findings And Analysis From The Mueller Report

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

The 448-page document, released after a nearly two-year-long inquiry, says Mueller's investigation did not establish that the Trump campaign "conspired or coordinated" with the Russian interference effort, which was described as "sweeping and systematic." This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, justice reporter Ryan Lucas, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. I'm Ryan Lucas. I also cover the Justice Department. I'm Mara Liason, National Political Correspondent. And it is Thursday, April 18th at 5.20 p.m., but the time that really matters to us is six hours or so since the release of the Mueller report in its redacted form. We have been reading for those six hours. This is a massive report.

How massive is it? It is this massive. Whoa, that's big. The entire studio has been demolished. It's two volumes, volume one and two, but they're actually part of the same report. It's like how the Fellowship of the Ring and the Two two towers are really just all part of Lord of the Rings. Whoa! We've all been flipping through

and skimming our PDFs. Here's what President Trump has to say about this. No collusion, no obstruction. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler feels a little bit differently. The special counsel made clear

that he did not exonerate the president, and the responsibility now falls to congress to hold the president accountable for his actions so i'm going to blow everybody's mind here i think we're just going to focus on what is actually in the report good idea okay so on the main question of russian interference the investigation said russian efforts were sweeping and systematic but that it could not establish that the Trump campaign conspired and

coordinated with Russian actors. It is more complicated than that, but we're going to dig into that in the second half of this report. Carrie, let's start with the question of obstruction, because the big question after Attorney General Barr released that letter several weeks ago was why exactly Robert Mueller didn't recommend any charges but didn't exonerate the president either? What did this report find? There is some really tough language in this report, Scott. Multiple episodes, 10 or more, that the investigators studied for evidence of possible obstruction of justice involving the president of the United States. They actually wrote, if we had confidence after this thorough investigation that the president clearly did not

commit obstruction of justice, we'd say that. And they didn't say that. But they didn't. In fact, they went out of their way to say they do not exonerate the president. And they said there are difficult legal issues in play. One is that the president has inherent authority to fire the FBI director, which is one of the things they were investigating. And another is that the Justice Department guidelines say you really can't indict a sitting president. You can't charge a president with a crime while he or she is still in office. But there were lots and lots of episodes, mainly involving President Trump trying to get his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, fired, trying to get the investigation limited, and in one major way, trying to get Robert Mueller,

the special counsel, himself fired. And a lot of this stuff we knew about already, either because it played out on national television or played out on Twitter or a lot of reporting dug into it. But in these episodes, things like firing Comey, things like that conversation with Comey about letting Michael Flynn go when the FBI was investigating Michael Flynn. What is important that we learned that we did not know before this report came out on all of these different obstruction efforts? Well, some of the things we had heard in the press and Donald Trump had called those reports fake and Mueller corroborated them, validated these press reports. We had heard that he had ordered Don McGahn to tell Rod Rosenstein to fire Comey, which McGahn didn't do.

There's a lot of color that Mueller adds. McGahn referred to some of the president's directives as crazy, expletive deleted. And that's an NPR redaction, not a William Barr redaction. Then we have the scene where Jeff Sessions tells Trump that Bob Mueller has just been appointed special counsel, that Trump says, according to the Mueller report, quote, Oh, my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm these conversations, which is a wonderful place to be after having been on the outside for 22 months of this investigation, plus before Special Counsel Robert Mueller actually took over the investigation, so for actually nearly three years. One of the things that we learned about a lot of these actions is that Trump made demands or suggestions to aides, and they refused to carry them out.

There are several instances in which this happened. White House Counsel Don McGahn did not pass on a directive from Trump to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that Mueller should be removed from office. Comey, of course, we know, did not end the investigation into Flynn as Trump asked him to do or suggested that he do. And then there are others, including one-time campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who did not deliver a message to then Attorney General Jeff Sessions that he should rein in the investigation. There are a lot of instances of aides essentially brushing off requests from the president.

And, you know, this is a bigger theme in the Trump administration. He's often frustrated when he can't get his employees or parts of the government to carry out his wishes, sometimes because they think it's not legal. We saw that with the whole DHS border brouhaha. But in this case, Don McGahn was acting as a kind of guardrail. He might have prevented the president from obstructing justice. The report says the president's efforts to influence the investigation were unsuccessful largely because the people under him declined to carry out his orders. They saved him from himself. Maybe more importantly, they saved themselves.

On any number of people, at least half a dozen who are listed in this report as having been involved in some of these conversations and directives with President Trump might have themselves faced prosecution. In fact, there's a specific line or two in the report that says we decided not to charge anybody else with obstructing justice because these people just said no. So before we get back to the broader obstruction conversation, Mara, the political question I have is that this is not some like mid-level career lifer at the Department of Homeland Security or whatever, ignoring presidential directives. These are his top aides. These are his inner circle. These are people who have been with Trump for a long time, basically saying, yeah, I'm not going to do that. Because, as Kerry said, they all have an obligation to follow the law,

to uphold the Constitution. Don McGahn, his job is actually to be counsel to the presidency. He's not the president's personal counsel, although the president does tend to see the government as his personal employees. You know, why can't I have an attorney general like a private attorney? But as Kerry said, they have an obligation to the rule of law, not just to the president of the United States. Kerry, you look at the second half of this report, and it's instance after instance of President Trump being obsessed with this investigation, wanting to shut it down, wanting to stop it, being angry that it happened to begin with, telling people to say things that weren't true. Why is that not obstruction of justice in the end? Like, what was the thinking here? Because I will be honest with you, when I got to the end of each section and they lay

out the legal theories, I was very confused trying to read and understand it. Here's the thing. The special counsel distinguishes some conduct by President Trump, some behavior. They distinguish this obstruction or alleged obstruction in two phases. One is when it was just Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor being investigated. And part two, phase two, is when President Trump himself realized he was under investigation for obstructing justice. And part two, phase two, is when President Trump himself realized he was under investigation for obstructing justice. And that's when this report describes really amping up the pressure on some of the people in the White House to try to curtail this investigation, really dangling carrots and sticks at people like Michael Flynn and former

campaign chairman Paul Manafort. If you cooperate with the special counsel, I'm going to view that as being hostile. President Trump apparently dispatched one of his personal lawyers to tell that to Michael Flynn. You mean dangling a pardon? What was the implied threat? The word pardon didn't always come up. In fact, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates had conversations about what they would do if they decided to go to trial and not plead guilty. And the word pardon may have never actually been used. But what Manafort apparently said, he told the special counsel, is that the president will take care of us, which is very interesting language, kind of the language we've heard from Michael Cohen, President Trump's former fixer, too.

Kind of like the Sopranos. There were a couple of instances in here that do speak to the characterization that we have heard from a number of people who were involved in this investigation, most famously, former FBI Director James Comey, describing how the Trump inner circle works as akin to how a mafia organization works. And there's a bit of language that mirrors that in this report. Now, Scott, to get back to your question about the standards and the law. Yes.

The Justice Department basically says you cannot indict a sitting president. Robert Mueller reports within the chain of command of the Justice Department. So there are two options here. You can either wait till the president leaves office and charge that person then, or you can kick the can to your building, kick the can to the United States Congress and refer officially or unoffic, an entire body of conduct to the House Judiciary Committee. There were a few sentences in this report that a lot of people going through this seem to read as Robert Mueller encouraging Congress to keep investigating, to look into the obstruction of justice question. Is that a fair way to read those sentences?

Well, the sentences didn't explicitly say, I hereby refer this body of obstructive conduct to the United States Congress or to the House Judiciary Committee. But it came up in the course of a longer legal analysis about when presidents can be held to account and not. And this legal team pointed out that presidents are not above the law, right? So you can either charge them later on down the road, or Congress can get involved. And what this legal team determined, which is actually interesting, because before he was the Attorney General, Bill Barr wrote a 19-page memo on whether presidents could obstruct justice. And Bill Barr determined that by firing people the president

had the authority to hire and fire, that would not in and of itself be a bad act, a criminal act. This team determined that if you do something like that corruptly, a president can violate the law. You know, what's so interesting to me, look, every day of the Trump administration is like a crash course in civics and what our democratic institutions are and what's political and what's legal. But one of my takeaways from this is how high a bar there is for criminality, and rightly so. In other words, you can call on the Russians to hack your opponent's emails. You can praise WikiLeaks for disseminating the stolen emails. You can meet with Russian officials. You can lie about those meetings. You can expect to benefit

from Russia's illegal actions. And none of that can rise to the level of a crime. It's important that people step back and look at what this report says from a perspective of, say, three, four years ago. We have been kind of bombarded by information about how this administration acts over the past couple of years. A lot of what is in here and what the Trump campaign did, what the president himself did regarding obstruction. These are not acts that we normally see politicians take and see people on either side of the spectrum say, yeah, that's OK. That's such a good point, because there's there's things I'm like, yeah, we knew that we knew that we knew that. But like, take the meeting between Trump and Comey, where he asked everybody else to leave the room and seemingly pressured Comey to let this thing go with the Michael Flynn investigation. Like that was a

revelation that when when it first was posted and everyone got the the alerts on their phone, people were like pulling over to the side of the road. It was just like this earth shaking news story. And now we're like, yeah, OK, OK. Politically, isn't it a great thing for the Trump administration that so many of these stories were out there? Oh, absolutely. How about if we were hearing about Don Jr.'s meeting in Trump Tower with the Russians for the first time from Mueller? That And I think of everyone in this entire saga, the one person who has totally stuck to his knitting, has not ventured one inch outside the lane of norms is Bob Mueller. In other words, he had a job to see if there were any crimes, and that's what he stuck to. Democrats feel that Bill Barr went outside the lane where he kind of put the best spin on this as possible.

Certainly, they feel the president has destroyed norms left and right. But Bob Mueller had a job and he stuck to that specific job. All right. So that is the obstruction question. There was, of course, a whole other question. And that was the first question of the investigation, whether or not anyone in Trump's orbit colluded with Russian efforts to interfere with the election. We will talk your own time and your own pace. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist. Visit BetterHelp.com slash politics to learn more and get 10% off your first month. Support also comes from the American Beverage Association.

America's beverage companies are working together to support families as they reduce the sugar in their diets. Coke, Dr. Pepper, and Pepsi are providing more great tasting options with less sugar or no sugar at all. Smaller portion sizes, clear calorie labels, and reminders to think balance. More choices, smaller portions, less sugar. Learn more about how they're working together at balanceus.org. Okay, we are back. And let's dig into the original question of the investigation. Did anyone on the Trump campaign or in Trump's circle coordinate, collude with Russian efforts to influence the election? What does this report find? You know, this is amazing. Okay, so what these investigators say is Russia definitely interfered in the election and they wanted to help Donald Trump.

This report also says that the Trump campaign and people in the Trump orbit wanted to help. They especially wanted these damaging emails dumped out, but that they couldn't prove to meet the high bar of criminal law, criminal prosecution, that any Americans would be charged with conspiracy or coordination with those efforts. But there were tantalizing, tantalizing details along the way. Right. Because because you said right there, high bar, that does not mean no conversation, no interaction, no back and forth. In fact, hundreds of pages of the opposite. No, there is actually evidence in this report. Witnesses told the special counsel team that President Trump was monitoring the WikiLeaks dumps, was asking about them and was keeping man the FBI has linked to Russian intelligence. And Manafort passed along polling data to this business associate linked to Russian intelligence. Manafort also told this business associate about the campaign strategy for winning votes in

Midwestern states. This is August 2016. Wow. And what Barr said this morning is the reason that it didn't rise to criminality is because you have to have participated in the hacking in order to be part of a conspiracy to disseminate the stolen emails. This is a little complicated. So we've got hacking and we've got election law violations and there are different legal arguments for each, right? So they don't have evidence that any American was in connection with the Russians and hacking John Podesta's emails or the DNC server. And with respect to the Trump Tower meeting, remember that Trump Tower meeting in June 2016? There is an argument that the Russians were offering the campaign something of value and the campaign, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort were accepting. But the argument in the report is they couldn't prove that any of those people knew they were breaking the law.

They should have at some point in time called the FBI and said, hey, we are being approached by agents of a foreign power offering to help the campaign. We think that you should know about this and we think that we're not going to take anything from them because it's wrong. Those calls were never made. Is ignorance of the law a defense? It sounds like you could get thousands of people, millions of people could get off with that. Well, the challenge here is that you've got to prove for some of these legal violations an intent, an intent to break the law. And if somebody, say somebody with no political experience and very little experience in dealing with Russian lawyers or operatives, attends a meeting about adoptions, which is actually Russian sanctions, and they don't

know anything about election law, they might not know that they are accepting a thing of value in violation of the election laws. I'm just saying they'd have to prove that in court, and that can be a hard thing to do. And this is why we keep coming back to this idea of the openness that the Trump campaign had to accepting help. It may not rise to the level of criminality, but they were most definitely willing to accept what the Russians were offering. So, Ryan, earlier in the Mueller investigation, there were two different indictments that laid out the case for what exactly Russia was doing to interfere with the election. There was the one that was all about disinformation on social media, and there was the one today or anything about the conversations with people in Trump world about it that we did not have before, an inside kind of detailed look, almost fly on the wall in some cases, and what the Russians were saying to one another as they carried out both of these operations. And what those indictments did when

they came out was essentially put to rest this idea that some folks, including the president, had argued, which was that we can't actually say that it was the Russians who carried out this campaign. And what this part of the report does is just nail that home, that we can prove that, yes, it was the Russians doing this, it was a sweeping campaign, and it was a deep, deep going effort. One of the things that this really reminded me of, and was kind of shocking, because I think I'd just forgotten the detail or wasn't really expressed this fully, was just how effective some of these efforts were like this wasn't just tweets zooming around. This was organizing rallies that real people came to. At one point, Donald Trump actually retweeted pictures of these real world rallies that were organized

by these efforts. Right. It was it was not just about getting people to like something on Facebook or retweet something on Twitter. There were numerous instances, as you said, of people actually getting out on the streets. And as it would turn out in these, you had the Russians ginning up both sides. There was an instance in Texas in which they encouraged people to get out on one side of the street in one neighborhood and people on the other side of the issue to get out on one side of the street in one neighborhood and people on the other side of the of the issue to get out on the other side of the street and have counter protests. Part of this was just about sowing discord. Whenever there was a divisive issue in the 2016 campaign, the Russians were generally on both sides of it. Okay, so we're going to move forward to the the politics of this

and what comes next. But before we do that, this was a very long report. We've all been reading it. We've all probably read different parts of the report. And I don't think any of us has read every single page yet. So we're going to do a little bit of a version of can't let it go like we normally do. We're going to talk about one thing you cannot let go that you read in this report today. Carrie, you want to go first? Mine is former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his hang dog demeanor. So there are a number of episodes where the president is brutalizing then Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from this investigation to begin with. And on one occasion, Sessions attempted to resign. Various other White House officials chased him down in the car and got him

to rescind his resignation. But after that, Reince Priebus, the former White House official, said that the president had kind of a shock collar on Sessions and a shock collar on the Department of Justice. So Sessions was kind of just, yeah, in a rough place. And after all of this came to pass, Scott, it got so bad at the White House for Jeff Sessions that the report says for an entire year, every time he went back to the White House, he had a letter of resignation tucked in his pocket for when he needed it. That is some rough, rough imagery right there. The attorney general of the United States, like a hang dog and hurt. What a sad thing to put into your suit pocket every day.

And one of the very first and most loyal, actually one for a long time, the only senator who supported Donald Trump. Absolutely. One of his earliest supporters and most loyal and the most devoted to Donald Trump's agenda. OK, so I will go next. A lot of stuff in here, obviously. But one of the things that kept coming up was just the value that Trump world places on the presidential tweet, how important it is to them. And this is actually in a footnote. Apparently, this is during the Michael Flynn saga, right around the time that Michael Flynn was fired. And remember, if you may remember, there was a back and forth. The White House was saying he resigned. He was fired. It kept going

back and forth. Mara, I think you asked the president at one point, did you fire Michael Flynn? So this is a footnote from an interview with Chris Christie, who was then New Jersey governor and was at the White House for lunch. Apparently, Sean Spicer had kind of disparaged Michael Flynn from the podium at a press briefing. Here is the footnote. During the lunch, Flynn called Jared Kushner, who was at the lunch, and complained about what Spicer had said about Flynn in his press briefing that day. Kushner told Flynn words to the effect of, you know the president respects you.

The president cares about you. I'll get the president to send out a positive tweet about you later. Kushner looked at the president when he mentioned the tweet, and the president nodded his assent. I will bestow a royal tweet upon you. Yeah, so forget the pardon promises. The promise here that's important was, I'll give you a positive tweet. Right, I will bestow a royal tweet upon you. A lot of people read those tweets. Come on now. They do mean something. They are official statements from the president. That's exactly right. Ryan? Mine is a game of kind of

presidential inner circle hot potato with one of these requests that the president made, or suggestions or orders, directives that the president made to Corey Lewandowski, who was once his campaign manager. And in the summer of 2017, the president asked Lewandowski to deliver a message to Jeff Sessions. He had Lewandowski basically take dictation from the president so he would have this letter that he could deliver to Sessions. What it was basically saying is that Sessions should give a speech publicly announcing a number of things and say that he was going to take over the special counsel's investigation and limit the scope. But Lewandowski didn't want to have anything to do with this. He kind of, he took it home, kind of ignored it. He locked it in his safe at home, kind of forgot

about it for a while. He was asked about it again, kind of fudged it with the president. Eventually, he tossed this hot potato to a White House official, Rick Dearborn. Dearborn didn't want to have anything to do with it. He was caught with this hot potato. Ultimately, Dearborn says he didn't do anything with it either. He was just like, I'm not getting involved. So somebody just dropped the hot potato. The president ultimately let it go. But man. And ding, nobody involved got charged with obstruction of justice. So perhaps it was smart to drop the potato. Drop the potato. Drop the potato is the important legal lesson.

Mara, you're up last. So my can't let it go is a tiny granular tidbit from the report that has nothing to do with Russia. Well, only tangentially. Just like Donald Trump. Yes, right. Sarah Sanders, the press secretary, told the Mueller investigators that when she told reporters that, quote, countless members of the FBI, countless, that's a lot, countless members of the FBI had called the White House to express dissatisfaction with FBI Director James Comey, it was, quote, just a slip of the tongue. Oops. I guess slip of the tongue is

the new euphemism for I made it up. So it's not a crime to lie to the press, but I kind of got a kick out of it. But I thought you could use slip of the tongue once, but it's my strong recollection that Sarah Sanders was asked that question more than once, and she answered the same way. I guess there's no statute of limitations on slip of the tongue as an excuse. Okay. Unfortunately for us, it is not illegal to lie to the press. But over and over and over again throughout this report, the details about what was happening contemporaneously,

when you match it up with what the White House was saying was happening, a whole lot of discrepancy. But the really deep takeaway is in the old days, press secretary's credibility was all they had. Now it just doesn't matter. The White House doesn't care if they tell the truth or not because the rules don't apply to them and they're not trying to convince anyone. They're just trying to stick with their base. Okay, so that's the report. Whole lot more on the report. You can go to npr.org where we have annotated

and highlighted the key sections of the report and written a whole lot of analysis that you can dig into. But let's talk about the politics in the final part of this podcast. At the beginning of the episode, you heard President Trump say, exonerated, no collusion. Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, saying, you know, just about the opposite.

This is not the end of this story for a whole bunch of reasons, legally, because the report lays out 12 redacted cases that Mueller has referred to other prosecutors. But politically, Mara Barr is clearly going to testify before Congress. Looks like Robert Mueller is going to be called to testify before Congress. What happens next? collusion he wanted, no crime of conspiracy or coordination, let's use those words instead of collusion, and no obstruction. And the fact that Barr's out there saying this on TV. Meanwhile, the Democrats have a 450-page report that many fewer people are going to actually listen to. You'd think that this would help the president. So number one, we're waiting to see polling data. But number two, the Democrats who want to continue to follow the roadmap that Bob Mueller gave them when they interview Mueller and Barr and look into some of these things, they have a lot of big decisions to make. There are some Democrats who think the president should be impeached ASAP.

But the Democratic leadership, Nancy Pelosi, has said she doesn't think there should be impeachment unless there's an overwhelming bipartisan call for it. And we certainly didn't see that coming out of this report today. And that message didn't really change. Didn't really change. Steny Hoyer, the number two Democrat in the House, said impeachment isn't worthwhile because we're having elections in 18 months and the voters can make their own judgment about this. So I think that in some ways, if you're somebody who agrees with Nancy Pelosi, then you think the Democrats just dodged a bullet. In other words, they didn't get the hot potato of impeachment thrown at them. They can continue investigating, but they can also move on to things that voters care about a lot more than the Russia investigation, like health care and jobs.

Hot potato is the phrase of the day. You're welcome. Mara, just like politically set aside congressional investigations and impeachment, and let's just talk about voters and their perception of the president. There's a lot of material in here that that I don't think I would want voters to hear about me if I were running for office just in terms of urging people to lie, yelling at subordinates, you know, angrily watching television and making decisions based on that. Like this was not a flattering picture of the Trump White House. But it's not a picture that's diametrically opposite from what we already know about Donald

Trump. We don't think that he's a meek, mild, calm person. And all of a sudden, we're seeing this very dissonant view of him. I can tell you that the White House feels pretty good about where it is. Yes, a lot of this stuff is damaging, but I haven't heard anyone who says, whoa, this is a really big threat to us. One final point that I will make relates to this investigation more broadly, everything that transpired in 2016 and since. You look at Russia's operation to influence the 2016 election from an intelligence perspective, from a foreign policy perspective, from a geopolitical perspective. This was a victory for them. This has dominated U.S. political discussion for the past three years.

Republicans and Democrats are at each other's throats. But that's not because of Russia only. In other words, we were very polarized all by our very own selves, thank you, without Russia's help. Absolutely. Absolutely. But this has contributed to it. Absolutely. And this is a victory for Russia. But isn't the victory that they got Donald Trump elected? That's what they wanted. They got that too. I mean, what I think you're going to see in the next election is the same thing, only maybe without Russian bots.

The same kind of divisive messaging. Agreed. Agreed. All right. By the way, if you were wondering what the full title of this was, it ended up being Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, Volumes 1 and 2, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III. There you go. You can read the whole thing on NPR.org. We have highlighted and annotated the key parts. We've written a lot about it as well. So check that out at our website.

That is it for today. As always, we will be back in your feed as soon as there is news to talk about. I'm Scott Tetreault. I cover Congress. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. I'm Ryan Lucas. I also cover the Justice Department.

I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.