Today, Explained - It's Robert Time!

Episode Date: April 18, 2019

Attorney General William Barr released Robert Mueller’s report today. Vox’s Andrew Prokop reads between the redactions and Ezra Klein explains what it all means. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

HelloFresh makes conquering the kitchen a reality with deliciously simple recipes and fresh pre-measured ingredients delivered to your door. Right now you get $80 off your first month of HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com slash Explained80 and enter the code Explained80. That is HelloFresh.com slash Explained80. The Justice Department has just appointed a special counsel to lead a new investigation into Russian influence in the election. The department naming former FBI chief Robert Mueller as special counselor. Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, is now a criminal defendant.

National security advisor Michael Flynn says that he is cooperating with the special counsel's probe. Thirteen Russians and three Russian companies interfered online and in person in the 2016 election. Michael Cohen's offices were raided by the FBI for reasons unknown at this time. The jury found Paul Manafort guilty of intentionally dodging taxes on millions of dollars. Jeff Sessions is now out as Attorney General. President Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen has pleaded

guilty to lying to Congress about his contacts with Russians. The Department of Justice will also make the report available to the American people after it has been delivered to Congress. Andrew Prokop, Mueller reporter at Vox. It's finally here in redacted form. What does it say? So the Mueller report is divided into two main parts. The first is about Russian interference in the election, and the second is about whether President Trump obstructed justice. And this is where we were the last time we talked. That time we just had a four-page summary. This time we have a 400-odd

page report. So what does it say specifically starting with the Russia investigation collusion? Mueller makes it very clear that there was a Russian effort to interfere with the election. It relates to the two main areas where he has already filed charges against various Russian nationals. The first of these areas is the social media propaganda effort. And the other area is the hacking and leaking of Democrats' emails. So Mueller starts off by saying, yes, Russia did interfere in these two main ways. However, Mueller did not establish any conspiracy between Trump associates and the Russian government on either of these two fronts,

the social media propaganda or the hacking of the emails. What does the report say about the link between Trump associates and the Russian government specifically? Mueller writes, Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts. The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. So basically, Russia wanted Trump to be president and tried to make it happen.

The Trump campaign was happy to get Russian help, but the two never really met. There was no deal cut, or at least not enough evidence to establish such a deal being cut between Russia and the Trump campaign. One thing I don't really get is the report says that when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Trump that Mueller had been appointed on May 17th, 2017, Trump reportedly responded, quote, Oh, my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked.

Yes. End quote. Why would you say that unless you did something very, very bad? Mueller writes at one point, the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the president personally, that the president could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns. Basically, Mueller thinks that even if there was no conspiracy between Trump and Russia, he had ample other reasons to really want to try and stop this investigation in its tracks.

And I guess that's where the obstruction comes in. What do we learn from this report about how much the president himself may have tried to obstruct the investigation, obstruct justice? The second half of the report describes 10 different episodes in which Trump, while president, may have attempted to obstruct justice by interfering with the Russia investigation, essentially. These include things like his firing of James Comey, his efforts to stop Comey from investigating Michael Flynn, and also various other things that we've heard less about. For instance, an effort to push out Mueller himself, an effort to get his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to try to tell Jeff Sessions to rein in Mueller's investigation. So Mueller goes over what the facts show on all of these topics.

But he does not make up his mind one way or the other whether this amounted to criminal conduct. And he says that one of the big reasons why he decided not to make that call is that Trump is the president and the Justice Department has held that you can't prosecute a sitting president. So the gist of a lot of this

is that Mueller is trying to lay out the facts of what happened here without going so far as to say this was criminal obstruction of justice or this wasn't criminal obstruction of justice. And what does he say about what the president directed others to do to maybe slow this investigation down or make it go away? There's a good quote here where Mueller writes that the president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined

to carry out orders or accede to his requests. In other words, Trump kept telling his subordinates to interfere with investigations or to fire people or to shut down various lines of inquiry. And those people around Trump kept not doing it. This is why he's not charging any of Trump's aides with obstruction of justice, because essentially they just didn't do what Trump told them to do. It's a little confusing, right? He's saying Trump wanted people around him to commit obstruction of justice, and he's done a bunch of things that seem very much like obstruction of justice, but he's still not saying that this is definitely obstruction? It is confusing, and there have been questions about why Mueller chose this approach exactly. Mueller makes it clear again and again that he is definitively not exonerating Trump. Mueller writes, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the

president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. Congress, which has the responsibility for potentially impeaching a president, and of course, the American public can kind of make up their minds for themselves. How much of the report was redacted? And do we know why what was redacted was redacted? So there are some significant redactions. Each redaction is identified with a justification.

Okay. There are four main categories of that. First is grand jury material. Second is material that relates to ongoing investigations. Third is material that could compromise intelligence sources and methods. And fourth is material that could compromise the privacy interests of peripheral third parties. So there are black bars. Some whole pages are blacked out.

Sometimes it's just certain words or phrases. And some of these do appear to be important. Roger Stone is facing a trial that in part relates to what he has said about his efforts to get in touch with WikiLeaks regarding the stolen Democratic emails that were hacked by Russia. Because of this pending trial, the government is under an obligation not to disclose material that could prejudice the outcome in that trial. So a lot of the stuff about Roger Stone in here is completely blacked out. And that includes whether any Trump people worked with WikiLeaks or had come into contact with the hacked emails before they became public, that really isn't resolved here. A lot of that is blacked out. Democrats want Robert Mueller to come testify. Might we learn more about this if that happens or

from the hearings that could follow? The Justice Department is going to provide a version of the report with fewer redactions to Congress in private and let them look at it. So we may learn through leaks about more stuff that's redacted in the public version. Mueller did not appear at Barr's press conference about the report today, and there is no sign that he has any plans to speak about this anytime soon. Democrats on the Hill certainly want him to testify, but it's unclear whether that will happen. You've been reporting on this for two years, and today you finally got to touch the thing, read the thing. What did you make of what

you saw? All of this obstruction stuff looks pretty bad. Trump pretty clearly attempted to interfere with this investigation again and again and again. And it didn't in the end work. So far as we know, the investigation continued and it did reach a conclusion. But it does tell us something that the president of the United States is someone who's willing to keep trying to use his power in this way to try to impede an investigation into people around him and eventually himself. This should never happen to another president again. This hoax, this should never happen to another president again. Thank you.

I ask Ezra Klein what all of this means for the presidency and the country after the break. Yesterday when I got home from work, there was a box waiting for me on my stoop there. It said hello on it. It came from HelloFresh. The box had a convenient warning that said, don't panic, your ingredients are safe, but this box is upside down. I found that very helpful. It also said this box is 100% recyclable, which I liked. I hope it gets recycled.

Cracked open the box and found three recipes. Creamiest mushroom ravioli, grilled cheese and veggie jumble, green pepper and black olive flatbreads. I brought them to work with me just in case. HelloFresh wants you to know that they make conquering the kitchen a reality. So if you've never conquered it, now's the time. The meals come together in 30 minutes max. They call for less than two pots and pans and don't require a lot of cleanup. And right now you get $80 off your first month of HelloFresh when you go to HelloFresh.com slash explained 80 and enter the code explained 80. That is HelloFresh.com slash explained 80 and enter the code explained 80 for $20 off your first four boxes, which is to say $80 off your first month. Ezra Klein, before we had a chance to even read this report today, William Barr told us what to think about it.

Why did he do that? I think there are three ways to read that press conference. One of them is that the audience is Donald Trump himself. Donald Trump, as you will read if you read this report, is very into his subordinates spinning for him and defending him and protecting him. So William Barr goes out before anybody else has publicly seen the report, although not, by the way, before the Trump administration has seen the report. And he goes out and gives an extremely protective of Trump summary. President Trump faced an unprecedented

situation. As he entered into office and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office and the conduct of some of his associates. But the other thing, and this is a kind of classic way of exploiting a weakness in the press, is that what Barr was trying to do was he was creating visual clips that the news would run all day. There was an hour or so between his press conference and when the report actually came out. So during that period, all that was really being run was clips of him talking and then people talking about him. And then, of course, those clips would be run on the nightly news, too. I think that his spin on the report was so friendly to Trump and then the

report was so much more mixed than that, shall we say, that it might ultimately backfire. Yeah. How does what Barr said in his summary weeks ago and this morning line up with what we read in the actual report? I almost want to pull out of all the summaries and all the talking. Like, what if you just woke up like Rip Van Winkle and just read this report? And what I would submit is that it is incredibly damning. It is actually shocking to read it all stacked up one after the other, after the other, after the other. I would say that the big picture story that is being told here, and then you can decide how you feel about that story, has a couple of parts. One, and this

is literally the second sentence of the report, is that Russia had a sweeping and massive operation to influence the 2016 election in Donald Trump's favor. The Trump campaign believed that would benefit them. They also, by the way, during this period, the Trump organization was in talks to open up a Trump Moscow. This went on for much longer than Donald Trump admitted. It went on well into 2016. And during this period, there was some advanced warning for Trump associates of the WikiLeaks hacks, the hacked Hillary Clinton emails. So there's all that. Then there is this obstruction piece. And the obstruction is much more damning than I thought. I'm somebody who came into this thinking Donald

Trump had obstructed justice just given what we had seen. He had fired James Comey. I mean, there was a lot that was in the public record there. But when you read that part of Mueller's report, what he is saying, I would argue this is a fair summary, is that they believe Donald Trump has obstructed justice and they do not believe it is proper for them to make that judgment. They say again and again that if they thought he had not, they would say that. They say that they are not making a traditional prosecutorial judgment but they think it is fair for Congress to make judgments about whether or not the president has overstepped his boundaries here. And they offer 10 different instances where they say there is a plausible case that one might want to investigate about whether or not obstruction was done. And they offer a lot of evidence about what happened. If the most damning thing in this report is the obstruction of justice that Mueller saw from Trump and his subordinates,

does it matter if William Barr has already cleared the president on obstruction of justice? I mean, matter is a hard word here. So what matters? What was ever going to matter here? There was never a chance, not a real one, that Republicans in the Senate were going to vote to impeach Donald Trump. So the idea that this is going to lead to impeachment, I've said this for a long time, has been fanciful. So what does matter mean? It matters that we know this. It matters that we have a better record. The investigations that are going to come from this, right, House Democrats are going to launch many investigations coming out of this report will matter, at least again, in terms of getting us more information. But then there are two questions in terms of whether it, in terms of getting us more information. But then there are two

questions in terms of whether it matters in terms of political consequences. One is whether or not anything in the report or any investigation stemming from the report lead to some kind of congressional action against Donald Trump, right? Impeachment is fundamentally a political decision. It is a political consequence. And then there's a question of the election. And does it matter in the way people assess Trump? And you know what? I'll the election. And does it matter in the way people assess Trump? And you know what? I'll be honest. I'm inclined to think that neither one of those are going to be a way in which this matters. I think people's minds on this are very made up. We did not see much change in polling around this after Barr's initial summary. And I don't think

we're going to see a huge change after this. And similarly, while I think Democrats will investigate a lot by the time those investigations are really bearing fruit, I think we're going to be so deep into 2020. They're not going to want to launch those kinds of proceedings. And one last point on this, another way it should matter, there's a lot of information here on Russia trying to hack, among other things, election systems. They appear to have, in fact, taken over the computers of at least one Florida county. Now, I'm not saying they changed the results of the election in that way. I don't see evidence of that. But among other things, we could do a lot to harden security, both for political actors and for our actual election systems against not just Russia, but other

foreign incursions. And that is another thing here that worries me. Talking about our next election that isn't that far away, I wonder, you know, hearing William Barr this morning stressing the point to say that this is unprecedented, what exactly is the precedent that we now have that special counsel Robert Mueller lists out 10 instances of obstruction and nothing might come of it? What does that mean for the expansion of executive power and executive privilege? Because it feels like what this amounts to is saying, here's what the president can get away with. When I look at the history of the past couple of years and the Mueller investigation is part but not all of this argument, what I see is a political system in which it is clear that our methods of

accountability are broken. The true methods of accountability, the true mechanisms of accountability we have are functionally partisan. I don't think anybody believes the Republican Congress would have treated something similar the same way if it had been about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. They will work or arguably will work, although they can also be overused, if the Congress particularly is controlled by the opposition party, and they will fail if it is controlled by the president's party. But Trump is the leader of his party, and he's out there today after he's received this report saying what an injustice this investigation was, as if all these people in his orbit weren't indicted or charged as if Mueller didn't produce 10 potential examples of obstruction of justice.

One of the things that has been striking to me about the administration's spin on this is that even if you take the very generous view of the president's motivations, it's quite damning. So what William Barr said this morning and what the report says in different ways throughout it is that Donald Trump was just so angry. He was so mad that this investigation was going on and it might cast doubt on the legitimacy of his election or it might distract other parts of his presidency. They began to engage in all these other behaviors. And the implication of that from Barr and others is it's all understandable that, yeah, maybe he did kind of obstruct justice and lie a lot and try to fire people who were looking into what Russia had done and whether or not there had been connections to the Trump campaign when they were doing it. But it's understandable because he was really upset. America's political system, turned it in in his own head to a transactional benefit for him, and then took any effort to figure out what had gone wrong and what had happened as an attack on him that he had to defend against. That's quite damning. I mean, when you're president of the United States, you're not just you. You're not just like a

competitor on some political reality show. You're the president. You represent this country, even the parts of it that didn't vote for you. And Donald Trump's consistent inability to conceive of himself in that larger role is one of the true ways in which he has been too small and too narrow for this job. Ezra Klein hosts the Ezra Klein Show from Vox. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Before we go, one last note about HelloFresh. They got a bunch of different options to choose from. Classic, veggie, family. They've even got a Mother's Day box for you.

There's a Mother's Day brunch. There's a Mother's Day dinner. Limited time boxes, y'all. $80 off your first month of HelloFresh at HelloFresh.com slash Explained80. Enter the code Explained80.