Democrats holding on to hopes for Mueller’s testimony
WASHINGTON — Democratic lawmakers hope to use special counsel Robert Mueller’s public testimony Wednesday to revisit dramatic episodes in which President Donald Trump attempted to derail or interfere with the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In his final report, Mueller declined to come to any conclusion as to whether Trump obstructed justice and therefore committed a crime.
But his prosecutors unspooled vivid details about an anxious and angry president willing to break long-standing traditions of presidential behavior to try to control the course of what was supposed to be an independent criminal investigation.
Democratic lawmakers contend that a public airing of the president’s behavior at the coming hearing will move public and congressional opinion and may help build a case that Trump’s actions warrant impeachment — even if Mueller did not recommend criminal prosecution.
“For many Americans this will be blockbuster, new information,” predicted Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, who said he plans to quiz Mueller about the instances of possible obstruction of justice described in the report.
“We just need him to convey the facts, and that will result in people learning … there is a lot of evidence that the president obstructed justice,” Lieu said.
Republicans assert there is no need to rehash material Mueller described over hundreds of pages in a report that has been available to the public since April. They note Mueller came to no conclusion that the president broke the law.
The ranking Republican on the panel, Rep. Douglas Collins of Georgia, predicted during a Fox News interview last week that the hearing is going to demonstrate “nothing is there” in terms of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia.
Mueller’s report painted a portrait of a president who repeatedly sought to get aides and associates to disrupt the special counsel’s investigation and whose efforts were periodically stymied only because underlings refused to follow his instructions.
When informed of Mueller’s appointment in May 2017, Mueller’s report indicates Trump slumped in his chair and declared, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency.”
Mueller may resist a dramatic retelling of those events. In a 10minute-long news conference announcing the end of his investigation in May, he said he did not wish to testify publicly, saying his testimony is all contained in the 448-page document his team submitted in the spring.
Still, Democrats hope he will agree to reaffirm details already outlined in the document. Lieu said a fair review of these examples and others in the report would lead a reasonable person “to an inescapable conclusion: Donald Trump committed a felony.”
Mueller did not draw that conclusion. Instead, he wrote that his team decided to avoid a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” one way or the other.
A former Watergate prosecutor, Richard Ben-Veniste, said Mueller has a public service obligation at the hearing to explain the significance of his findings.
“He can do more to explain the danger of foreign meddling in our election process and the obstructive behavior of the president in the context of normal prosecutorial tradecraft,” Ben-Veniste said. The former prosecutor recommended Mueller look back at the news conference conducted by Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox just before he was fired in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre.
Cox’s eloquent review of complex legal questions circulating in Washington in October 1973 gave the public the opportunity to see his reasons for rejecting a White House proposal to allow President Nixon to avoid turning over tapes as ordered by the courts.
“What report on its own has ever galvanized the public into action?” Ben-Veniste asked.