The NPR Politics Podcast - Robert Mueller, Long Silent, Speaks — Then Says It Was His Final Word

Episode Date: May 29, 2019

Mueller addressed reporters at the Justice Department in his first public statement since taking over the Russia investigation, ending two years of near-silence even under one of the hottest spotlights ever to burn on a public figure. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, and national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. 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

Hi, this is Chip. I'm currently taking a break from a fat bike ride, riding the dirt road through the middle of Trump National Golf Course in beautiful Bedminster, New Jersey. This show was recorded at 109 p.m. on Wednesday, May 29th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Enjoy the show! What's a fat bike? I don't know. Is it those bikes with those gigantamous tires? Oh. I believe in walking places. I don't believe in locomotives or bicycles.

I have a different definition of fat bike. We'll get to that later. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress.

And I'm Keri Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And we said we would be back in your podcast feed if there was news we needed to know about. We just didn't know. It would be only a few hours later. Keri, you were on your way to work this morning. Where were you? I was in an Uber.

I had just left the gym and I was heading to NPR headquarters here in fantastic, hot Washington, D.C. when I got an email saying Robert Mueller was going to speak. And he speaks as often as, well, nobody. Yeah, never in the last two years. So I hightailed it over to Maine Justice. Was there like, I want to hear like screeching tires, like the Uber going like, turn around to Maine Justice. Not so much. Just me frantic. Just typing in an app. Exactly. It's like, just change the address in your phone. All right. So as you said, we have basically never heard Robert Mueller speak since he became special counsel. That changed today. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for being here.

Carrie, you were in the second row, middle seat. What were your headlines from that? You know, his work is done. He's proud of the work he did. Anything else that needs to happen next is the responsibility of some other actor, either in politics or in law enforcement. And the fight may continue, but Bob Mueller is not going to be waging it. My take home was he was like, read my report, please. Also, I'm now going to drop the mic and walk away. Yeah. Yeah. And I think my big takeaway was that he was asking Congress to just let his report stand and to stop asking him to defend it, which I think is a big request for a group of people who have a lot of commitments about investigations based on this report.

So his statement was about nine minutes long. We aren't going to play the whole thing here, but we are going to walk through some of the key moments. Carrie, I guess let's just start at the beginning. Yeah. You know, there's been an open question about what Mueller intended to do with respect to President Trump and obstruction of justice. And here's what he had to say about that. And as set forth in the report after that investigation, if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime. So this is all stuff. Actually, everything he said was in the report, more or less. But here you have someone saying out loud this line that was a stunner from the report. Yeah. I mean, Mueller clearly thinks that not enough people have actually read what he had

to say. The notion that he repeated it in short form, kind of Cliff's notes this morning, is meaningful, both for people around the country trying to figure out what happened in 2016 and what may be happening in 2020. And this is the exact argument for why Democrats want him to testify, why they want him to appear publicly, because people haven't read the report and people are more likely to watch somebody talk about it and they want it to appear publicly, because people haven't read the report and people

are more likely to watch somebody talk about it and they want it to come directly from his mouth and they don't want it through the filter of the attorney general or anybody else in the administration that they believe could be in some way compromised in their conversation about this report. Carrie, one of the big questions after the report came out was, why didn't Robert Mueller make a charging decision? Why didn't he say what he wanted to do with respect to President Trump? Remember that this special counsel was appointed by then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. And his whole structure inside the Department of Justice was reporting up that chain of command. This is a guy who follows orders, follows rules and regulations.

And there are rules and regulations on the books, interpretations of law on the books at the Justice Department that basically say it's unconstitutional to charge a sitting president with a crime. Here's what Bob Mueller had to say. Under longstanding department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that too is prohibited. The special counsel's office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider. Never on the table. Never on the table. Not going to happen. Can I ask you, Carrie, how does this fit into the general precedent for the way a special counsel would be addressing questions like this?

Is it uncommon that he would be giving a press conference like this to explain that kind of point? Okay, so a couple of things are going on here. One is that in the old timey days, like when I started my career in this crazy town, there was a law on the books called the Independent Counsel Statute. And that gave these kinds of special prosecutors basically unfettered power to do what they wanted after they were appointed. They had to check back from time to time, but they did what they wanted. That law was allowed to lapse after a series of abuses. Even Ken Starr, a former independent counsel, testified that it went too far, should lapse. And so now what we have is this regulation where any kind of outside prosecutor reports up through the chain at the Justice Department. As a result, Bob Mueller,

in order to make this kind of statement today at the Justice Department, would have had to run that past the Deputy Attorney General or the Attorney General of the United States. We did not hear from either of those people today, in part because the Attorney General, Bill Barr, is in Alaska doing some big event with Alaska native populations. But we do know that it was run up the chain because the White House said that they had heard in advance. They had gotten a heads up that this was coming. Yeah, and I asked folks on the Hill if they knew it was coming. They did not.

So this was entirely decided on the executive branch side. Right. As it should be. As it should be. That's the way things are supposed to work. And it seemed like Robert Mueller also, because he mentioned it at the beginning and the end of his statement,

even though there was a lot of focus on obstruction of justice, there's one thing he didn't want to get lost. And I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments, that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. And that allegation deserves the attention of every American. Hey, fools, why not stop fighting amongst yourselves and pay attention to a foreign

adversary attacking us all over again, is the Johnson paraphrase of what he just had to say. But that wouldn't be so much political fun, right? You know, he did early on in his remarks say that we determined the Russian military intelligence officers had attacked our elections, hurt a certain political candidate. He didn't say the words Hillary Clinton, but that's what happened. Though he did say that her emails had been hacked, her campaign emails had been hacked. And he said that, you know, basically this was done in certain materials were released in an explicit effort to interfere with the election and harm one of the candidates. And that's a very, very serious thing we shouldn't

lose here. It's a very serious thing that we shouldn't lose. But as we talk to a lot of experts and a lot of political thinkers about this, one thing they tell me over and over is it's something that has dripped out over time and something that the American people have generally come around to accepting was part of the narrative or that that was being investigated. It was it didn't feel like a bombshell to a lot of people when it came out because it was part of the general conversation. Russian interference in the election, I mean, just has been part of our conversation about our elections going into 2016, going to 2018. This is not new for a lot of people. And we also don't, it doesn't seem like there's this groundswell of public pressure to pass legislation that says no presidential candidate will accept help from a foreign adversary or to pass legislation that says no presidential candidate will accept help from a foreign adversary or to pass other election security legislation that's sort of out there,

but isn't getting a lot of attention. Because I think that's kind of squishy, right, is knowing exactly what you can do about an outside force and an outside, you know, an outside government trying to interfere in something that is so central to the way that our democracy functions. I think it's very squishy for a lot of lawmakers to figure out how to address that. What can they actually do about preventing some sort of crime that's happening by non-American citizens? It's not as easy to wrap your head around as the word collusion or as obstruction. And there will be more on that. We are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, what Congress does now that Mueller has made this statement.

After James Reed was murdered in 1965, there was a national outcry. But back at the scene of the crime in Selma, Alabama, many people responded differently. So what happened then? And what could justice look like all these years later? NPR's new podcast, White Lies, is seeking answers. Listen and subscribe now. And we're back. President Trump tweeted almost immediately after Mueller spoke, and he said this. Nothing changes from the Mueller report.

There was insufficient evidence, and therefore, therefore in our country a person is innocent. The case is closed. Thank you. Sarah Sanders also put out a statement. The press secretary saying basically Robert Mueller says he's returning to private life. He's done. We should all move on. And just about every Republican on Capitol Hill who put out a press release in the past couple of hours said the exact same thing. Move on. And Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham says, and as for me, the case is over.

So he is basically shutting down any expectation that his committee in the Senate will be looking into the Mueller report at all. However, the Senate is not the only part of the government. And the House is very interested, is continuing to try to investigate, continuing to try to get Robert Mueller to come and testify. Robert Mueller, however, does not seem all that interested in coming to testify. Now, I hope and expect this to be the only time that I will speak to you in this manner. I am making that decision myself. No one has told me whether I can or should testify or speak further about this matter. There has been discussion about an appearance before Congress. Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report. It contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we made.

We chose those words carefully and the work speaks for itself. And the report is my testimony. He's saying the report is his testimony. Is that going to work? Well, we haven't heard any Democrats say that they're going to subpoena Roller and make him show up. I haven't heard anybody say that they're re-upping their request for him to appear. But we're also not hearing them say that this is enough for them. In part, that's because a lot of people haven't read this report. They want Mueller to come and testify.

They want him to explain his report in his own words. And they want to have that opportunity in that moment for the American people to hear it directly from his mouth and not from the attorney general or somebody else in the administration who Democrats believe may have been compromised in this process. I get the feeling some Democrats would be happy if Robert Mueller just came and read the entire report live on C-SPAN. Which they already tried to do. Yeah, they've tried to read portions of the report into the House record and the Senate record. Several people have done that because they think there are very important things in here that are getting lost in the coverage.

And they want a concentrated moment of televised attention to going through the things in this report with the person who wrote it. You know, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, put out a statement, and she said that what Mueller and his team have done is to provide a record for future action. Mueller referenced that today in his remarks in his own way. He talked about how the Justice Department opinion on the books that says you basically can't charge a sitting president meant for now, but it didn't mean forever. First, the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could be charged now. And second, the opinion

says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing. Well, when he said those words, I saw flags waving in the sky in my mind and heard bells and whistles because what he's talking about is that I word, Kelsey, that your people don't want to talk about. My people being Congress. Well, yeah, I mean, they're still not talking about impeachment for the most part. Actually, most Democrats who have come out and said anything about this are repeating something that was kind of laid out by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler. And he said that it falls to Congress to respond to the crimes, lies and other wrongdoing of President Trump. And he says that he thinks that Mueller laid out three central points that

he did not exonerate the president, that obstruction of justice is a serious crime, and that the Constitution points to Congress to take action to hold the president accountable. And that is where things go from here. It's about investigations. We're hearing everybody, every single Democrat coming out and saying the investigations have to go on. And they are talking about using whatever was in the Mueller report as the foundation for those investigations and potentially other investigations into other people. So this doesn't get smaller just because Mueller is done talking. Right. And there is this other I word other than investigations, the word impeachment,

which is the remedy in the Constitution. Right. And Democrats are in this moment where they're actually debating whether or not impeachment gets them somewhere different than just investigations, because there was there's been some discussion about whether or not opening an impeachment inquiry would give them more access to documents. And it may have a stronger position in court for sure. But they're not sure. And that's not something that leaders really want to go down that path right now. Leaders are more or less arguing that they're the system that they're using right now of investigating and going through the courts is bearing fruit. It may be a little bit slow and it may be incremental, but they're having moments of victory. And we saw that just the White House and the president are saying, case closed on this, let's all move on, they aren't moving on. They want an investigation of the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, John Durham, to look into the origins of this whole Russia investigation, to look into what looks to be intelligence gathering in 2016, not just by the FBI, but by other folks inside the intelligence community, I think the CIA. And in fact,

one of the president's former aides and allies, Corey Lewandandowski has been on TV trying to connect all of these dots without evidence into a package that wraps up former FBI Director Jim Comey, former CIA Chief John Brennan, and in his view, former Vice President, now President Trump's possibly chief rival in 2020, Joe Biden. That may be where this is going politically. Well, regardless of that investigation or the congressional investigations, there is one man who says he does not intend to be involved. And that man is Robert Mueller. We are formally closing the special counsel's office. And as well, I'm resigning from the Department of Justice to return to private life. We are going

to leave it here for today. Tomorrow, we will be back with our regular weekly roundup. This is, in fact, our second podcast in your feeds today. Earlier this morning, another one posted. It was part of our series of interviews with the presidential candidates. It's an interview with New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Please go check that out. And we will be back with you tomorrow. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.