July 24, 2019: The Day Robert Mueller Made It Clear Trump Was a Liar

 

7/24/19: Robert Mueller testifies for nearly six hours in front of two congressional panels. He refuses to go beyond what the report he has submitted says. For example, he refuses to say if the president “took the Fifth” in answering written questions. Mueller is precise, measured in response, even dull. 

Almost as soon as he completes his time on the stand, the partying at the White House begins. There are no “bombshells” in the televised testimony. The president will later call Mueller’s performance the worst in all the storied history of congressional hearings. 

Total exoneration, baby!

Mueller testifies under oath - something you never saw Trump do.

 

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“I gather you think knowingly accepting foreign help in an election is an unethical thing to do?” 

Rep. Adam Schiff

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IF YOU WATCHED all six hours of testimony – and took notes – you know the president was not exonerated. 

Dull or not, the facts Mueller laid out were damning. 

It will require a special blog post to address this topic; but a few highlights should suffice till then. First, Mueller slapped away the idea that he had hired a team of “angry Democrats” to frame Trump. In twenty-five years with the Justice Department he had never inquired about the political leanings of any of his hires. “It just isn’t done,” he told a Republican lawmaker who questioned him. He hired lawyers he felt could do the best work, men and women he knew for “integrity,” above all. 

In six hours of questioning, not one Republican member of either committee used the word “integrity” to describe Donald R. Trump. 

Meanwhile, Democrats focused on massive evidence of obstruction of justice. We learned, for example, that Trump called Attorney General Jeff Sessions at home and tried to get him to un-recuse himself and fire Mueller. Trump ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to get rid of Mueller, too. 

“Did the president ask McGahn to lie?” one questioner asked Mueller. The Special Counsel often answered with one word. 

“Yes,” he said. 

Dull? Okay. But the Special Counsel had just said the president lied – and lied in a failed attempt to obstruct justice.

 

When Louis Gohmert (R-Texas) had his turn to speak and rambled on for five minutes and tried to make Mueller sound like he was on trial, Mueller’s response was, “I take your question.” Nothing more. 

Mueller had his dignity to consider. 

Gohmert was a clown. 

Jim Jordan (R-OH) spent his five minutes asking why Mueller never charged Josef Mifsud, a secondary figure in the investigation, as if something nefarious must have been afoot. 

The real problem: Mifsud has disappeared. 

Neither Jordan nor any other Republican wanted to know why the following members of Team Trump were now convicted felons: Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, General Michael T. Flynn, Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos – and probably Roger Stone – currently under indictment for witness tampering and scheduled for trial this fall. 

 

“I hope this is not the new normal, but I fear it is.” 

Mueller was also asked, “Isn’t it true that an unsuccessful attempt to obstruct justice is still a crime?” 

“Correct,” he said. He did not elaborate because the statement stands as made. 

Rep. Mike Johnson had the closing five minutes for the Republican side during the first hearing and tried to insist that President Trump had never mislead anyone and cooperated fully.

 

In the second session, Val Demings, a Florida Democrat and former police chief of Orlando, asked Mueller why his team never asked Trump to sit down, face to face, and testify under oath. 

Mueller explained that the president and his lawyers had stalled the investigation for over a year. It was important to turn the report over to Attorney General William Barr, so he might make the decision about what to do next. 

Mueller admitted that Trump left several questions, submitted in writing by investigators, blank. 

“Did he plead the Fifth?” Demings wanted to know. 

Mueller refused to answer. “I’m not going to get into that,” he replied. He was sticking to what was in the report.

 

The rest of her questioning went pretty much like this: 

“Trump did not answer follow up questions?” Demings asked, trying a different tack. 

“No.” 

“Many questions he didn’t answer at all?” 

“True.” 

“His answers were often contradictory and incomplete?” 

“True.” 

Did he give answers that “contradicted other evidence?” 

“Yes.” 

Could the Special Counsel say that “the President was credible?” 

Mueller: “I can’t answer that question.” 

Is it fair to say, she asked, that Trump’s answers “showed that he wasn’t always being truthful?” 

“I would say, generally.” 

Those are the exact answers Mueller gave – what pundits were saying made for “boring” TV. 

Mueller wasn’t a TV prosecutor. He was a real prosecutor, with decades of enforcement experience. He was laying out facts. He did not need to showboat, like GOP lawmakers trying to make absurd points. All the evidence anyone might need to begin impeachment was there in the Mueller Report.

 

The best exchange of the day may have come when, during afternoon hearings, Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee, asked Mueller a series of simple questions. 

“I gather you think knowingly accepting foreign help in an election is an unethical thing to do?” Schiff inquired. 

“And a crime,” Mueller interjected, his stoic manner momentarily animated. 

“And unpatriotic?” Schiff added. 

“True.” 

“And wrong?” 

“True,” Mueller said again, displaying a trace of disgust, no doubt with the current occupant of the Oval Office.

 

Republicans, and Trump’s avid fans, who purport to love this country far more than his opponents, should try to remember a time when their Orange God ever said we need to protect elections from Russian interference. Mueller might not have stirred the masses with his answers; but he was perfectly clear when he said Russian interference in our elections was “among the most serious” challenges he had seen in all his years in law enforcement. 

Russia, he said in answer to a question from Rep. Will Hurd, the only member of his party to ask about Russians all day, did interfere in the 2016 election. 

They would interfere again. They were, he warned, still interfering “as we speak.” 

A Democrat asked the Special Counsel if he thought this was the “new normal,” that politicians would accept help from foreign powers to win future elections. “I hope this is not the new normal,” Mr. Mueller replied, “but I fear it is.”

BLOGGER’S NOTE (5/11/22): Team Trump blocked testimony by Don McGahn for nearly two more years, until the courts beat down the last challenge, and he went before Congress in June 2021. McGahn told lawmakers that Trump kept pressing him to have Mueller removed as Special Counsel, that he felt “trapped” by the president’s orders, and that he was prepared to resign if pressed to break the law. 

That should tell you something.