The NPR Politics Podcast - One Year Of Robert Mueller As Special Counsel

Episode Date: May 15, 2018

Thursday marks one year since Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. We talk about the big takeaways from the past year and what is still yet to come. This episode: political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and reporter Miles Parks. 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

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. This is Emma and Justin. We're currently in Memphis because we're moving from D.C. to Austin. And we're trading in our member station WAMU for KUT. You're keeping us company on this road trip. This podcast was recorded at 12.07pm on Tuesday, May 15th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department.

I'm Carrie Johnson. I also cover the Justice Department. I'm Miles Parks. I cover election infrastructure and election interference. Okay, so I'm really pumped about today because you all have one thing in common that I know of, and that is that you are our experts on the Russia investigation that Robert Mueller has been undertaking for almost exactly one year. Almost exactly one year, believe it or not. And my forehead has the wrinkles to show it. Our lives have changed forever. I mean, the one year anniversary, I've been told we shouldn't call it the Muellerversary, but I like that portmanteau, so I'm going to go with it.

I think we're all too tired to have any sort of wit about the name of this thing. All right. OK. But yeah, so this Thursday does mark one year since Robert Mueller was appointed to dig into Russia's 2016 election interference. So today we're going to just run through the basics, but also try to give all of our listeners some big takeaways from this. So let's start with the Mueller 101. Who is Robert Mueller? Why was he brought on to do this investigation in the first place? Robert Mueller is the indispensable man of his generation when it comes to law enforcement. This guy was the FBI director for 12 years, including the period right after 9-11, when the country was reeling from terrorist attacks. Before that, he was a prosecutor. He spent a bit of time in private practice, didn't like it, and then

volunteered to go back to work as a line prosecutor, bringing murder cases in Washington, D.C. during the crack cocaine epidemic. So this guy is a guy who is government through and through, and he's really one of the only people that this Justice Department could trust to carry out this investigation. I remember when he was appointed a year ago, and the reaction from people on the Hill on both sides of the aisle was very much, this is the man you want to do this job. You have trust in them on both sides, both Dems and Republicans. And that may have changed a bit among some Republicans over the past year. And we can talk about that later. But certainly, when Mueller was appointed, it was greeted with a fair amount of appreciation.

And even when he was leading the FBI, President Obama asked to extend his run by two years, and that request was confirmed unanimously in the Senate in 2011. So there's proof on paper of that as well. Okay, so a couple other things. Remind me, who exactly appointed Mueller? How did he get appointed? But also, what was he tasked with in the first place? Robert Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein,

who's in charge of the Russia probe because the Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself since he played such a big part in the Donald Trump campaign, which of course is under investigation. And remember, just about a week before Rod Rosenstein made this surprise announcement that he was going to appoint Robert Mueller to lead the Russia probe. The president had fired FBI Director James Comey, and Comey had in some way retaliated by sharing some information about the president's activities and conduct, which prompted the deputy attorney general to launch this investigation, starring a special counsel, Robert Mueller.

I do think it's kind of hard to remember that last summer, just how insane every single week was. You know, I think we've we've almost hit like a little bit of a lull in the Mueller investigation. If you compare it, if you compare it to last summer in terms of it seemed like every single day there was something Comey or Mueller related, you know, happening. I feel like you just jinxed it, though. I know. I'm terrified. And let's talk for a minute about what Robert Mueller is supposed to be investigating or what we know about that. The deputy attorney general at the time of this appointment on May 17, 2017, said Mueller is authorized to conduct this investigation into links and or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign and any matters that arose or may arise directly from this investigation.

Now, over time, we've had a bit of a sense of the contours, but there's still a lot we don't know about what Robert Mueller's investigating. Okay, so Carrie, remind us, what exactly has happened over the last year? And really also, what do we actually know right now? A lot has happened in just one year. Robert Mueller's investigators have got a grand jury to indict something like 19 individuals and companies. And they've secured five guilty pleas. I talked with experts about this, people who have literally written books on special prosecutors and independent counsels. And those folks say that this pace by the Mueller team stacks up with the best investigations, politically tinged investigations in modern history. Now, let's talk also for a second about who's pleaded guilty already. People like George Papadopoulos, the foreign policy aide in the campaign. People like Michael

Flynn, the former national security advisor who was a close aide to Trump during the campaign and actually served in the White House. And a few other folks as well. And among the folks fighting charges right now are Paul Manafort. Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman. And Manafort is scheduled to go to trial in July in Virginia on bank fraud, tax fraud and other charges. If that trial happens, it's going to be amazing. And if that trial happens, one of the key witnesses against Paul Manafort is going to be Rick Gates, his former business partner. And former deputy campaign manager who stayed on in a role in Trump world even after the inauguration.

So, you know, some people have pointed to the fact that Manafort and Gates have been charged with crimes that occurred before the inauguration took place, but some of those crimes were actually still going on later on, some of the money laundering issues that they have been charged with. So let's dig a little bit deeper into these indictments you guys were just talking about. There are those 13 Russians, there's Paul Manafort, there's what that guy Van Der Zwaan, I believe was his name. What have these indictments told us about what Robert Mueller is investigating and how far he has gotten? The Manafort investigation largely centers around lobbying work that Manafort and Gates were

engaged in from about 2005 to around 2016, late 2016. Does it tie directly into the question that's hanging over this, which is the question of coordination with Russians during the election? It doesn't directly relate to that. It is not that headline, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a thread that runs throughout. And this is also, there's the question of what Manafort knows. There's a question of what Gates knows. And the fact that Gates has decided to flip and work with investigators, we don't know what he's told them. We don't know what he knows. And that may actually tie directly into the question of coordination. I think looking at the indictment of the 13 Russians and the three companies related to Russian interference, the indictment showed that we had this entire basically small PR agency doing work to affect the minds of voters and basically

sow doubt, sow polarization among voters about race, about crime and policing, and then also about the integrity of the elections at the same time that you had hackers from Russian IP addresses trying to break into voter registration databases and so doubt about the integrity of whether those results were accurate. So this all plays into one another in that way. Kerry, you've been covering that case. Where does that stand at this point? Okay, so before this indictment in December of these 13 Russian individuals and three businesses, there was a lot of talk among the political chattering class about, okay, this is supposed to be about Russia. Where's the Russians? Where's the Russians? And then Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, came out and said, here are your Russians on a platter, right?

But the thinking was at the time, these people are in Russia. There's no way they're ever going to get into an American courthouse or the American justice system. However, there has been a very interesting snag. None of those individuals have shown up in court. But lawyers, American-based lawyers for one of those businesses, have shown up in court. And they've had at least one court arraignment that I attended. And this is a company called Concord Management and

Consulting. And it's owned by a guy who's known as Putin's chef because he had a lot of contracts to do catering for events at the Kremlin and elsewhere. Putin's chef has not shown up in court, only his American based lawyers, right? And these lawyers had to go through a special process because Putin's chef has been sanctioned by the American government. So they had to go apply for a license through the Treasury Department, even take this guy's money and appear on his behalf in court. They are challenging this indictment. And they are the only people who've shown up in court to challenge this indictment. lawyers, Eric Dubelier, a very, very aggressive former prosecutor I covered back in the late 90s, talked in court recently about the Mueller team having wanted to indict a ham sandwich.

He's asking them to put up or shut up. And the speculation, the informed speculation is that the lawyers for this company, Concord Management, may be trying to jam up the special counsel and get the special counsel to reveal something about how it knows what it knows and how it got this evidence against these Russians. We're going to see how far this goes. There's a court hearing later this week I'm going to attend. And there was a lot of interesting information in that indictment. There was talk of certain conversations that were had between individuals who were indicted and phone calls that they had with other people, certain emails that they had, which implied that this is stuff that all, I mean, it's not implying it. It means that this is material that the special counsel's office had. And that's something that I would

suspect the U.S. government would not want to reveal how they got that information. Yeah. Funny you should mention that because at the last hearing, Jeannie Rhee, who's one of the special counsel lawyers, said, sadly, only one of the defendants is in court today. We would be thrilled if everybody else showed up. I'm not so sure that's true, but that is not really a bad outcome for the Russian government to have their lawyers basically pressing for Mueller's investigation. They want more names. If you operate under this assumption, they want more names in the public. They want more scrutiny of the Trump campaign. They want more scrutiny of our entire political system.

Okay. So, you know, looking at the things that have happened thus far, you know, looking into collusion, obstruction of justice, indictments, whatever, is there a particular strategy we can see him doing? Do we have any sense of like a roadmap he seems to be following? We know that in a way from some of the witnesses and lawyers for some of the witnesses who have testified or appeared before the grand jury or Mueller's investigators, that he's looking at the information warfare campaign that's described in this indictment of the 13 individuals in Russian companies. We know he's

looking at Manafort and Gates's money. We know he's looking at Michael Flynn's conversations during the transition with the Russian ambassador and other people who are not named in those court papers, but other people connected to the campaign at the time in December of 2016. And we know as well that the special counsel team is looking at hacking. Who hacked the email of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman? Who hacked the email of the Democratic National Committee? And who hacked other accounts? We've seen no charges there, but that's one of the most intriguing things to me right now. When are those charges coming? Right. Right. When are the charges coming? And also, you've made this point before, Carrie, but how much are we going to know about all that information? Because there's no

set thing that other than giving a classified report to Rosenstein, there's no public report that has to be made, right? Right. So under the old system that really plagued Bill Clinton's presidency in the 1990s, the independent counsel law, which has since expired, had some reporting requirements. But the system that exists now, under which Bob Mueller has been appointed, requires him to submit reports to the Justice Department. It's not at all clear that those reports will become public. It's possible members of Congress could demand them and then demand public testimony from people like Bob Mueller, Rod Rosenstein, and other people. But those are unknowns right now, how much we're going to find out. There's a complicating factor here, which is that when you use grand juries, there are secrecy rules and secrecy laws inside the United States

where you don't want to reveal too much grand jury material. So any report, if it exists and would become public, would have to be scrubbed for some of those details. And this is part of why members of Congress say that their reports, the reports from the House Intelligence Committee and more so the Senate Intelligence Committee are so important because there will be an unclassified version that will be delivered to the public. And they view that as the best way to inform the American electorate about what the Russians did in 2016 so that the country can take steps to ensure that it doesn't happen again. All right. We're going to have to put a pin in that.

But really quick, I want to remind everyone that we're bringing the show on the road to Charlotte, North Carolina, on June 1st. We'll be talking about all things midterms, and it's a chance to see how the podcast is made. Head to nprpresents.org to grab your ticket. Now let's take a break, and when we get back, we'll talk about what happens next for Mueller's investigation. Support for NPR Politics and the following message come from Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. Rocket Mortgage gives you confidence when it comes to buying a new home or refinancing your existing home loan. With Rocket Mortgage, you can apply simply

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It's NPR's weekly music discussion and discovery podcast with tons of new songs and artists to fall in love with. Hear All Songs Considered in the NPR One app or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back. And I want to look forward to what happens next for Mueller. Carrie, do we have a sense right now of how much longer this will go on for or really what is left to do? There is no set timeline. If there were one, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, would be in charge of it. He's testified publicly on Capitol Hill that the special counsel is closely supervised by him. He knows when big things are about to happen. He has the power to weigh in. But he has not put a timeline on this investigation.

As for what's already happened, this White House has said it's been unbelievably cooperative with the special counsel. It's turned over tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pages of information. It's made dozens and dozens of people available for interviews with the special counsel. Who has not been interviewed? The president's daughter, Ivanka Trump. The president's son, to the best of my knowledge, Donald Trump Jr. The president himself, which we know there have been on again, off again, days of our lives conversations between the president's lawyers and the special counsel about whether that's actually going to happen. Right, because he said that he was willing to talk, right? But those around him are a little bit iffier on it.

He at one point told reporters 100 percent he would talk with the special counsel. And he's waffled since then about that. He now seems to be arguing that maybe the special counsel investigators are not going to be fair. So why would he sit down with them? And his new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, no stranger to the Justice Department, says that Rudy does not want the president to talk to the special counsel. It's not clear whether that's going to happen or not. And I actually, I spoke with Rudy last week about this. And he one thing that he's brought up in public and brought up in my conversation with him as well was this idea of, you know, it's it would take. I don't want him to sit down with Robert Mueller. And if I do, I negotiations that are coming up. The Iran deal is going to be scrapped now, has been scrapped, and he's going to his ability to govern the country. And therefore, it may be too big of an ask. This, of course, is him posturing a bit for public reasons and political reasons. But that's his take on it right now. Wait, but let me rewind. If there's a subpoena,

doesn't Trump have to testify or no? He could fight it. He could fight it. And a lot of legal experts think that based on the precedent set in the Nixon case, which was for tapes and documents, not testimony, but based on that precedent, many lawyers believe that when you balance the president's prerogatives as the chief executive of the country against the criminal investigators need to know wins, trumps, forgive me, the president's prerogatives. But that could be a court fight. That could be a court fight if it happens. And the president has actually recently brought on a new lawyer to work in the White House, a man by the name of Emmett Flood, who actually worked on the Clinton impeachment case, and then later worked as a White House lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, when it was butting heads with the House Judiciary Committee and other committees over the firing of U.S. attorneys.

Flood is a man who firmly believes in executive privilege. He is a man who has fought and defended executive privilege in his previous work in the White House. I spoke with a couple of colleagues, former colleagues of his this past week, and they said a lot of his views on executive privilege and prerogatives stem from his time working for Clinton and for George W. Bush and the feeling that you had an independent counsel in Kenneth Starr who they thought went way beyond his mandate, was painting way outside the lines and trying to use the investigation to remove an elected president, and that he brings that experience and mindset into his job now.

So they think that bringing Flood on board means that you are going to have a more adversarial approach from the White House in terms of defending executive powers and privileges. That is a very specialized kind of legal experience, right? Yes, it is. So we got into this a little bit before Miles was talking about this. But just to reiterate, you know, we've been watching this investigation from the outside for a year now. I mean, but we won't we won't eventually necessarily see a report from it. Right. Like what what dictates what we will and won't eventually find out about what Mueller finds out? a lot already from the indictments and guilty pleas that he has, that he secured. The report, as Kerry talked about earlier, will go to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. He's under no obligation to release that to the public. But as I said earlier, this is partly why Congress views its role as so important, is that that's going to be

the chief vehicle for informing the American public about what they learned. But that's a different role than a criminal investigation, which I do think is like inherently problematic at this time in terms of when you look at how people view Congress and whether people trust Congress and the you know, all all the numbers that Danielle has looked so deeply into. But this information, I think it is it's just simply more valuable coming from the Justice Department, who I think people have a better view of different roles. Well, there's a there's a complication there, which is that Bob Mueller is a leak free zone. The guy has only made one statement about this investigation, one, in writing the day he was appointed almost a year ago. I accept this responsibility and will discharge it to the best of my ability.

That is all the guy has talked. The only time that Rod Rosenstein talked explicitly about this investigation was at that news conference unveiling the charges against the 13 individual Russians and the companies. A grand jury in the District of Columbia today returned an indictment presented by the special counsel's office. The indictment charges 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies for committing federal crimes while seeking to interfere in the United States political system. And Rosenstein in congressional testimony has defended Mueller to some degree. But neither one of these guys wants to talk. Remember, they have a big, big beef about the way the DOJ and the FBI handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation in the course of the 2016 campaign. They are very mindful of that. And so to the extent that they do talk,

short of a report, it may be in writing and it may be a relatively modest statement whenever this matter is closed. Which I think touches on the idea of how long this investigation is going, because the longer it goes, the longer people in Trump's orbit have to basically chip, chip, chip away at the credibility of whatever the Justice Department says at the end. So if we have no indication that this thing's going to end tomorrow or next month, we still have a long way to go. The people I've talked to are not expecting to be done by midterms. So I think the longer it goes, the more we're going to see basically the credibility chipped away at.

Yeah, I mean, actually, I was looking at the polls before I came in. And this is, you will be shocked to learn, a very heavily partisan thing among voters. So 54% of voters do see Robert Mueller's investigation as fair. 31% say it's not fair. So, you know, they're still pretty solidly in his favor. However, only 26 percent of Republicans, this is as of late April, said that this is a fair investigation compared to 79 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of independents. So one are you're saying one in four, almost one in four Republicans does not believe. No, one in four Republicans believes this is a fair investigation, according to Quinnipiac, as of late April. Three in four Republicans believe that this is a witch hunt. Or they're unsure, one or the other. That's something for the party of law and order.

That's really something. Well, and one more interesting data point. Some of these numbers have shifted. For example, the 54 percent of Republicans said as of March that they thought Trump should testify. As of May, 39 percent said that Trump should testify. Democrats, 90 or more percent say so. Independents, 70 or more percent say so. This is a recent CNN poll, by the way. But among Republicans, that has really slipped. In a way, it hasn't much for Democrats or independents, if at all. But leaving all of that aside, looking ahead to November, as far as what is driving voters to the polls, my sense is any candidate I have asked, and I've asked a lot, what are voters telling you they're concerned about? I asked them open-ended,

I have not yet once had anybody say Russia. And I have not yet once had anybody say, you know, Robert Mueller. I think this is a thing that very heavily colors how people feel going in. But I mean, I think people still have things like health care and their bills and, you know, all of those typical voter concerns at the forefront of their brains. That is my relatively anecdotal but educated guess of how this colors November. So we have one year of Mueller's investigation under our belt. Any final questions you really want to see answered in the next coming months? What are the biggest things on your minds? Well, I mean, the question hanging over this, of course, I'll take the easy one. Was there indeed any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia?

I just gave you a softballed in. You really did. In order to influence the outcome of the election. We know that there were contacts, but the question of whether it got to the level of actual, we'll do this, you do that, some sort of quid pro quo arrangement and who knew about it. That's a question I'd like to have answered. I'm going to go, I think, in your zone, Danielle, polling data wise. I'm really excited in November to see. I think there's going to be a lot of questions asked about how much did the Mueller investigation affect your vote, but also how confident are you that your vote was tabulated correctly, that the election infrastructure worked. And seeing that trend line from 2014, 2016, 2018, I'm really intrigued. The one thing this past year has taught me is the impossibility of making accurate predictions when it comes to this investigation. There are so many names that have come out by surprise. Investigators were so much farther

along than we thought or had any idea of. I don't think we can say how long this is going to go or where it's going to go. In fact, people ask me sometimes, where is this going to end? I have no idea. It could end in nothing. It could end in a wave of pardons by this president. It could end in lots of other places. I'm not betting any money on it. And the other thing that I'm really watching and following closely is the long-term impact on the Justice Department and the FBI. Let me say that these institutions, which I have covered for many, many, many, many years, the last year being especially long, have been under siege in an unhealthy way from partisans on the left and on the right. Let me explain. On the left, there's this idea out there that Rod Rosenstein and Bob

Mueller are going to save parts of the country from the decisions of voters. People who purchase Mueller time t-shirts and hats and make Bob Mueller a meme on The Onion. This is not who Bob Mueller is. It's not what he likes. And it's not a healthy role for law enforcement. He is playing in the lines of a criminal investigation and a counterintelligence investigation, not the political arena. Don't put him there. This is the wrong place for this guy to be. And if you're putting him there, you're contributing to some of the difficult position the Justice Department and the FBI have been under this White House. Now, on the right, the president, the vice president, allies of the president in Congress continue to

call this investigation a witch hunt. The Justice Department and the FBI have been under siege from the president and his allies for more than a year. The top two officials at the FBI have lost their jobs in the last year. And this is not super healthy if we have, God forbid, a terrorist attack in the country or another major public safety incident. Investigators need public confidence. They need people to cooperate with them and tell them which way the bad guy went and what he was wearing so they can chase him down and catch him and prosecute him. And these kinds of partisan impositions on the DOJ and the FBI have been unhealthy and I fear could have a lasting influence. Well, as Robert Mueller continues to do his job,

as we find out more about it via leaks or via indictments, we will tell you about it. But for now, that is a wrap. I failed to mention, by the way, this is Miles Parks' first NPR Politics podcast and not the last. Yay. Thanks, guys. You were nice to me. We're rarely that mean. Yeah, we will be back later this week. For now, our email address for your comments, questions, and timestamps, very importantly, recorded for the beginning of the show is nprpolitics at npr.org. Keep up with our coverage on npr.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and, of course, on your local public radio station.

I am Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. I'm Carrie Johnson. I also cover the Justice Department. I'm Miles Parks. I cover election infrastructure. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © BF-WATCH TV 2021