Mueller says he didn’t totally clear Trump
But terse, one-word answers produced no new revelations
WASHINGTON — Robert Mueller on Wednesday dismissed President Donald Trump’s claims of total exoneration in the federal probe into Russian 2016 election interference.
Mueller also told Congress he explicitly did not clear the president of obstructing his investigation.
And the former special counsel also rejected Trump’s assertions that the probe was a “witch hunt” and hoax.
In hours of sometimes halting and stilted testimony, Mueller also condemned Trump’s praise of WikiLeaks, which released Democratic emails stolen by Russia.
He declared Russian election interference one of the greatest challenges to democracy that he had encountered in his career.
Russia, he said, is “doing it as we sit here.”
Mueller’s reluctance at the televised Capitol Hill hearings to stray beyond his lengthy written report, and his reliance on terse, one-word answers, produced few if any new revelations.
But that didn’t stop Republicans and Democrats from their own divergent paths to question Mueller.
Trump’s GOP allies tried to cast the former special counsel and his prosecutors as politically motivated. They referred repeatedly to what they consider the improper opening of the investigation.
Democrats, meanwhile, sought to emphasize the most incendiary findings of Mueller’s 448page report.
They hoped that even if his testimony did not inspire impeachment demands — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made clear she will not pursue impeachment— Mueller could nonetheless unambiguously spell out questionable, normshattering actions by the president.
Yet Mueller appeared unwilling or unable to offer crisp sound bites that could reshape public opinions.
He frequently gave single-word answers to questions, even when given opportunities to crystallize allegations of obstruction of justice against the president. He referred time again to the wording in his report.
But he was unflinching on the most-critical matters.
In the opening minutes of the hearing, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, asked Mueller about Trump’s claims of vindication in the investigation.
“Did you actually totally exonerate the president?” Nadler asked. “No,” Mueller replied. When Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee, asked, “Your investigation is not a witch hunt, is it?”
“It is not a witch hunt,” Mueller replied.
He gave Democrats a flicker of hope when he told Rep. Ted Lieu of California that he did not charge Trump because of a Justice Department legal opinion that says sitting presidents cannot be indicted.
That statement cheered Democrats who understood him to be suggesting that he would otherwise have recommended prosecution on the strength of the evidence.
But Mueller later walked back that statement, saying, “We did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.”
His team, he said, “never started the process” of evaluating whether to charge the president.
Though Mueller described Russian government’s efforts to interfere in American politics as among the most serious challenges to democracy he had encountered in his decades-long career — which included steering the FBI after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — Republicans focused on his conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“Those are the facts of the Mueller report. Russia meddled in the 2016 election,” said Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.
“The president did not conspire with Russians. Nothing we hear today will change those facts.”
Mueller, pressed as to why he hadn’t investigated a “dossier” of claims that the Republicans insist helped lead to the start of the probe, he said that was not his charge.
That was “outside my purview,” he said repeatedly.
Mueller mostly brushed aside Republican allegations of bias, but in a moment of apparent agitation, he said he didn’t think lawmakers had ever “reviewed a report that is as thorough, as fair, as consistent as the report that we have in front of us.”