Sides lay out goals for talk with Mueller
Democrats focus on Trump; GOP says biases to be aired
— The House Judiciary Committee chairman said Sunday that this week’s hearing with former special counsel Robert Mueller will air evidence of wrongdoing by President Donald Trump and make a public case for impeachment.
“This is a president who has violated the law six ways from Sunday,” committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said on Fox News Sunday. He argued that Mueller’s report lays out “very substantial evidence” that Trump is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the constitutional standard for impeachment.
Republicans, meanwhile, pledged sharp questioning of the special counsel about what they see as a biased investigation.
“This is not a vacuum that the Democrats have completely to say the president was doing something wrong,” U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures. “The Mueller report is a one-sided report that has not been questioned from the other side. This is our chance to do that.”
Days before Mueller appears in back-to-back hearings with two House committees Wednesday, both sides seemed to agree that Mueller’s testimony could be pivotal in shifting public opinion.
“We have to present — or let Mueller present — those facts to the American people … because the administration must be held accountable, and no president can be above the law,” Nadler said.
Nadler said he hopes to take cues from the public after the hearing about “where we go from here.”
“We hope it won’t end up being a dud,” he added.
But Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, argued that “any thought of impeachment is waning.” He said Republicans in their questioning will focus on making clear that the Mueller report represents a “final episode” in the Russia investigation.
Collins said Republicans would show that it was time for Americans to move on, “so that the president, who has been leading on so many fronts with the economy
and everything that we have seen so far, actually can get to governing.”
In separate hearings, the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee will question Mueller on his 448-page report released in April.
Nadler said Democratic committee members would point Mueller to specific passages in the report, asking him to characterize whether the behavior described would constitute a crime such as obstruction of justice and whether the president engaged in that conduct.
The report did not find sufficient evidence to establish charges of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to swing the election.
However, the report also said Trump could not be cleared of trying to obstruct the investigation. Mueller and his team of prosecutors indicted 34 people but did not indict Trump; Mueller believed that Trump couldn’t be indicted in part because of a Justice Department opinion against prosecuting a sitting president.
Still, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee plan to focus on a narrow set of episodes laid out in the report to direct Americans’ attention to what they see as the most egregious examples of Trump’s conduct.
The examples include Trump’s directions to thenWhite House counsel Don McGahn to have Mueller removed and, later, orders from Trump to McGahn to deny that happened. Democrats also plan to focus their questioning on a series of meetings Trump had with former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in which, according to the special counsel’s report, the Republican president directed Lewandowski to persuade then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s investigation.
INQUIRY’S ORIGINS
Mueller’s appearance comes more than two years after the start of the Russia investigation.
In 2017, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, citing Comey’s public handling of the investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails. Comey had been supervising the investigations into Russian election interference and into national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had resigned after reports that he misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.
Shortly after Comey was fired, The New York Times reported that Comey had documented what he saw as Trump’s efforts to interfere with the election investigation.
After Sessions, a member of Trump’s 2016 campaign, recused himself from the investigation, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to take over the inquiry into election interference and any role that Trump and his winning 2016 campaign may have played.
Collins said Republicans want to focus this week on the origin of the election investigation. He alleged that a “corrupt cabal” of FBI agents colluded against Trump and his family, and he argued that it’s time “for the American people to realize that there was a problem at the FBI.”
“The Democrats want to focus on obstruction,” Collins said. “The whole investigation started from the discussion of Russian interference in our 2016 election. It’s almost like they forgot about that completely. But let me tell you, the Republicans have not forgotten about where this investigation started.”
Democrats acknowledge that public attention to the investigation has drifted in the months since the report was released.
“People don’t read a 448-page report,” Nadler said.
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee agreed.
“It’s a pretty dry, prosecutorial work product,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said on CBS’ Face the Nation. “We want Bob Mueller to bring it to life, to talk about what’s in that report. It’s a pretty damning set of facts that involve a presidential campaign in a close race welcoming help from a hostile foreign power, not reporting it but eagerly embracing it, building it into their campaign strategy, lying about it to cover up, then obstructing an investigation into foreign interference again to try to cover up.”
Intelligence Committee aides have said they believe that the public has received a slanted view of what Mueller found on the question of criminal conspiracy because of Trump’s repeated claims of “no collusion,” and that the details of Russia’s interference in the election — and the outreach to the Trump campaign — haven’t gotten enough attention. “Who better to bring them to life than the man who did the investigation himself?” Schiff asked.
However, he said later Sunday that he’s expecting a “reticent witness,” noting that Mueller has said he doesn’t intend to speak beyond the findings of the report.
“We understand the stakes. At the same time, I have to say I am very realistic in my expectations,” Schiff said late Sunday at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “He is clearly deeply reluctant to testify.”
Schiff, a former federal prosecutor, said he would like to know whether Mueller believes Trump should be indicted after he leaves office.
“He is not going to answer that question,” Schiff said. “But nonetheless, there are other ways of asking that question.”