Special Counsel Robert Mueller stood at a podium on the seventh floor of the Department of Justice on Wednesday and broke two years of silence. He repeated two things that were included in the report he submitted to Attorney General William Barr.
“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
“The Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”
Taken together, this was a reiteration of the point he tried to convey in written form. The president committed crimes and it’s Congress’s job to figure out how to handle it.
This really shouldn’t be news to anyone, but there was something about him saying it in person that gave it more oomph. Now there are video clips that can be played ad nauseam on the news.
It’s doubtful that this was the primary reason Mueller decided to speak up, however, because the new information he provided was that he did not want to testify before Congress and will not have anything to say if he is compelled to testify: “The report is my testimony,” he said.
The performance left everyone unhappy. The White House had done their best to argue that he president did not obstruct justice and William Barr claimed to have cleared him of the charge. Mueller argued persuasively that due to existent DOJ policy, Barr could not have charged the president with a crime under any circumstances, so clearing him was essentially meaningless. Only Congress can arbitrate a president’s crimes.
The Democrats were frustrated to learn that Mueller would not willingly testify and if subpoenaed would say almost nothing beyond what was already included in his report. To get a sense of how badly this will sit with congressional Democrats, you can read the letter minority members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent to chairman Lindsey Graham on May 8, 2019. As Nancy LeTourneau pointed out at the time, by listing 60 separate questions they wanted to ask Mueller, the Democrats demonstrated how critical it is for the country to hear from him.
Here’s a sampling of just two of those questions:
Why did the office elect not to pursue an interview with Donald Trump Jr. and did his refusal to be interviewed impact the investigation? If so, how?
To what degree was your investigation able to determine whether the Trump Tower Moscow project was part of an effort to gain influence over Donald Trump?
The first of those seems like something Mueller should and could answer without it violating any internal DOJ policy. The second one pertains to the counterintelligence investigation, and Mueller stated in his brief press appearance that his office has no role in determining what underlying materials of his investigation will be provided to Congress. In fact, Mueller was completely silent on the topic of the president’s behavior being explainable by compromise, blackmail, or financial considerations. It’s a bizarre oversight to have an investigation spurred by the president’s unorthodox pro-Russian behavior conclude without any reference to the subject.
Mueller’s strange sense of rectitude is putting everyone in a bind. He just made it harder for the Democrats to avoid an impeachment inquiry but denied them the one thing that would give that effort some momentum: his personal assessment in televised hearings. As for the Republicans, he dented their talking point that the president has been exonerated. Instead, they have to reckon with this:
“When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of their government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.”
At a time when Mueller’s former colleagues at the FBI, DOJ, and the broader intelligence community are being accused of treasonous acts and threatened with the death penalty, you’d think Mueller would recognize his duty to be a little more forceful in his remarks. If the Deep State is engaged in a coup, this is a particularly weak effort. William Barr has been authorized to selectively declassify material in an effort to bolster the president’s case that he’s been a victim of a concerted effort to unjustly remove him from office. Yet, Mueller seems content to watch his colleagues become victims of a concocted crackdown.
The Democrats now have to decide whether or not to demand that Mueller testify, and if so whether he should do so in public. They also have to decide if anything has changed as a result of Mueller’s press appearance that might lead them to begin an official impeachment inquiry.
As I said above, Mueller just made it both harder to resist impeachment and to turn public opinion in favor of impeachment. Nancy Pelosi is probably cursing him, and for good reason. Nonetheless, she should force him to testify in public. Even if he isn’t very responsive, just hearing him say in person what he wrote in his report will be beneficial to the public.
The White House will probably not be deterred in their effort to change the narrative from Trump and Russia’s crimes to the alleged crimes of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, and (yes!) Joe Biden.
Even if Mueller brought a pea-shooter to this knife fight, he did at least succeed in tossing everything up the air. We will have to see where things actually land before we’ll know if he did anything worthwhile.
I saw a careerist making every attempt to save future paychecks, which, like Barr, he now realizes will NOT be coming from some imaginary retaking of the Republican Party by Gerald Ford types, but will only come from the future Trump’s that the Republican Base will prefer.
He does not care in the slightest about whether or not Trump is compromised.
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Apparently no one gives a rat’s ass about Trump being compromised or enjoying the private company of Mr Putin. There’s a pee tape I hear one needs to be aware of.
Hard to argue with this…
Let’s pretend that it’s a Democrat as POTUS, and he produced the same document, would he refuse to testify if a Republican House asked? Would he say ‘I won’t testify, and if compelled, I will only read from my report.?
I really doubt that. His ethics, like Kavanaugh’s, are completely situational.
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I think Mueller would have done the same with a Democrat under the Special Counsel Rules. The difference is that under a Democrat with a Republican House, there’s no bullshit cowardice a la Pelosi.
This statement stuck out to me “he cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional.” Despite all of the talk about the DOJ memo on this subject I never heard it as a constitutional issue. It was couched in terms of fairness, or disruption to governance. Given the only way to resolve constitutional issues in our system is the Supreme Court, how would this memo ever reach that level when the department refuses to challenge its own legal conjecture?
The 1973 OLC opinion states: “The indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.” https://www.ajc.com/news/national/why-can-sitting-president-charged-with-crime/XpX8UKrbZHaSFUHGiRLSiI/
Gonna norm us right into fascism
We’re already there.
Their goal is an Aristocracy, rather than an oligarchy.
And it will be through totalitarianism that it happens.
Nadler still can’t bring himself to declare an impeachment inquiry, He got close but can’t get over the threshold. Really forthright and brave people these democrats.
Impeach the bastard and make all republicans live with this stain forever, if they wave it off.
Um, what special/independent counsel in history (let alone one operating at the explicit request of Congress!) takes the position that the submitted final report “is my testimony”? The author of every report commissioned by the federal government has to expect that they must field answers to Congressional questions about their report. Mueller is engaging in simply bizarre behavior.
Mueller seems to be saying that something has “struck at the core of the government’s effort to find the truth” and that this is impeachable. But obviously Congress would be expected to ask whether the National Trumpalist WH hindered his investigation, duh. And he should expect that he would have to answer this question. But our patron saint of Rectitude somehow thinks otherwise! So as for “norms”, this seems yet another example of our government collapsing before our eyes.
Dems can now clearly see the landscape of the battlefield spread out before them. General Pelosi now has to plan the engagement, send out the orders and commence the action, whatever it may be. The “conservative” forces are arrayed in “Fuck You, Eat Shit Drunken Nancy!” order. Mueller’s troops are declaring themselves patriotic neutrals. There won’t be any more documents or testimony, absent action by the Trumpalist courts, which is a gamble at best.
So what’s it gonna be? Keep the powder dry or advance? Even if an impeachment fails, it can at least be declared the last act of the (failed) constitutional order.
We need to keep repeating MLK’s eloquent words: “there is no wrong time to do the right thing.”
Mueller seems to be referring to what the letter from Rosenstein hired him to do. (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3726408-Rosenstein-letter-appointing-Mueller-special.html). Of course Congress has equal authority to ask him other questions, it seems to me.
I don’t agree with this at all. It’s as if nothing can go forward without further testimony from Mueller. His statement today was necessary and important, and I’m sorry he didn’t make it weeks ago, but he couldn’t until he was free of the DOJ, and everybody knows that. And you’re right, Booman, that it SHOULDN’T have been necessary, but it was MADE necessary by the mad spinning of Barr, Trump and the RW noise machine. But now he’s made his statement. In response, Biden says impeachment is now probably inevitable. In response, and quoting Mueller to back him up, Nadler just called Trump a liar in so many words several times (and Barr as well, he added), and pointed out that that is obstruction and obstruction is a very serious crime. And that’s just within an hour after Mueller’s statement. The important thing is that the media are now reporting the findings as authoritative. Sure Trump & Co. will come back, but they just lost a lot of ground, and so has their phony investigation of the investigators. You really have to read the Mueller report folks, there’ a hell of a lot in it. Now it’s time to ramp up the House investigations. If things continue to stay stuck where they were (which I doubt), it ain’t Mueller’s fault. And BTW, I don’t agree with Justin Amash’s politics, but I believe he’s treating impeachment as a constitutional congressional responsibility, and in that respect he’s way ahead of Nancy.
One of the problems with Saint Mueller’s reluctance to get his hair mussed in congressional hearings is that Republicans are already spinning it as him being afraid to answer questions about the origins of the probe and his “shoddy” and “partisan” investigation. You would think that at a minimum, he would want to confront the baseless charges of partisanship made by the president’s goon squad.
Look, I get it. He had an outstanding team that spent two years investigating, and undoubtedly their work product was probably very much up there on the quality scale of reports produced by the Federal Government. Good Job. He should get some kudos. But still, as Martin points out, Congress has very real and important questions about the probe and its scope, even if they do now have the primary responsibility to investigate and accuse the president. I know that many are hoping he will testify publicly, to help persuade the public on impeachment, but hopefully he will at least be willing to answer questions in a private hearing so they can put some bounds on the remaining unknowns.
If the President is not able to be charged with a crime, i.e. he can strangle a toddler on national television, then we need to start calling the office what it really is – God Emperor.
“The Democrats now have to decide whether or not to demand that Mueller testify, and if so whether he should do so in public. ”
Yes and yes. If he is going to be a reluctant witness, he damn well should have to go on the public record as reluctant. It would be a shame for someone with his reputation to turn out to be a toady, but if that is what he is, he deserves the public shame that goes with it. People put a lot of trust in Mueller, and they deserve his candor now.
It seems to me the pea-shooter/knife trope may be inapposite here, to the extent that Mueller is declining to consider himself a combatant at all.
I’m not sure what evidence there is that Pelosi would be cursing Mueller. The evidence suggests to me that she is heaving a big sigh of relief, because there’s no new bombshell to generate more pressure on her to begin impeachment proceedings, which she is determined to fight at all costs.
I would love to be wrong. Here’s a question to those who believe that the master politician is simply waiting for the right time to launch those proceedings: what could that time conceivably be? Given how far off the rails we’ve already gone, what single new event or revelation could possibly convince her to do a total 180? And given her conduct to date, how could she possibly pull off such a move credibly? (Should that somehow come to happen, in some universe, there are absolutely no grounds for assuming that she will follow through with committed vigor.)
The other day, Individual-1 nakedly politicized the intelligence services in full view, precisely in order to protect corruption on his behalf of the election in 2020 (while openly talking about executing FBI officials who investigated his campaign), the AG is summarily following through, and all Pelosi could manage was some Twitter snark about staging an intervention following a temper tantrum.
Indications so far are considerable that Pelosi is entirely unequal to this perilous historical moment, and they accumulate every day.
(NB her response to Mueller: “The Congress will continue to investigate and legislate to protect our elections and secure our democracy.” Short for: “We’ll continue to issue requests ineffectually from time to time while the Gravedigger ignores the bills we pass.”)
If I had to guess, I would say she is hoping for something so bad, he would be forced to resign. Something from his taxes, maybe?
Just a guess. If I’m right, she’s in a dream world.
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No, she’s doing multiple things, and they’re not as safe bets as she thinks:
1. Her consultants and pollsters are telling her that “health care” and “bipartisanship” polls well, impeachment does not, country sees it as divisive, punishes the divisive party. In this case, it’s the Dems (I don’t agree, I think it’s misleading at best, and if anything it could backfire)
2. She doesn’t see the Senate doing anything, so why bother.
3. She desperately wants the issue to go away, and is hoping someone else will do it for her. Reporters, presidential politics, “infrastructure”. Maybe the norm fairy makes the bad man go away if we keep pretending it’s not happening.
Norm fairy — love it!
Funny you mention the taxes. (Pelosi said that getting the returns would be a priority in the new legislative session.) It took Neal three months to issue the first statutory request. The subpoena followed more than six weeks later. It’s been nearly two weeks since Mnuchin’s refusal. Given these protracted and unwarranted delays, would one be wrong to conclude that Pelosi is really not so eager for the returns to come out after all?
She’s fallen back on her old line about not proceeding unless she’s sure she has the Repugnican votes in the Senate. Her pro forma “everything is on the table” bromide is clearly bullshit. (Somehow she doesn’t have any problem sending bills to the Senate that won’t get Repugnican votes there.)
This about sums it up. Whether it was her intention or not, Pelosi is by now fully complicit in the Repugnicans’ corruption; she’s as much an enabler as they. Heather Digby Parton warned against this shortly after the report was released.
Pelosi used to be my representative — and I have mad respect for her. But her refusal to even allow an inquiry to be opened mystifies me.
Slightly OT, but I am so tired of hearing elected representatives say that they took an oath to “uphold the constitution.”
The oath that they (and I) took states that you swear to “protect the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
That is far more specific than “upholding” the constitution.
Words matter — and our elected democratic representatives are choosing to use the wrong words. Why?
I think I know the answer, and it sickens me.
I just heard Barr, yeah Barr that guy, say on TV that Mueller could have reached a conclusion on criminality of Trump. He could not indict, but for reasons Mueller explained he chose not to do that and so Barr and Rosenstein followed that lead. Somebody tell me what is going on? WTF is wrong with Pelosi?