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!
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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
____________________
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.
