Mueller rejects Trump’s claims
Ex-special counsel warns Russia still a threat in ’20 election
WASHINGTON — Robert Mueller, the taciturn lawman at the center of a polarizing American drama, dismissed President Donald Trump’s claims of “total exoneration” Wednesday in the federal probe of Russia’s 2016 election interference.
In a long day of congressional testimony, Mueller warned that Moscow’s actions represented — and still represent — a great threat to American democracy.
Mueller’s back-to-back Capitol Hill appearances, his first since wrapping his nearly two-year Russia probe, carried the prospect of a historic climax to a rare criminal investigation into a sitting American president. But his testimony was more likely to reinforce rather than reshape hardened public opinions on impeachment and the future of Trump’s presidency.
With his terse, one-word answers, and a sometimes stilted manner, Mueller made clear his desire to avoid the partisan fray and the political divisions roiling Congress and the country.
He delivered neither crisp TV sound bites to fuel a Democratic impeachment push nor comfort to Republicans striving to undermine his investigation’s credibility. But his comments grew more animated by the afternoon, when he sounded the alarm on future Russian election interference. He said he feared a new normal of American campaigns accepting foreign help.
He condemned Trump’s praise of WikiLeaks, which released Democratic emails stolen by Russia. And he said of the interference by Russians and others: “They are doing it while we sit here. And they expect to do
it during the next campaign.”
His report, he said, should live on after him and his team.
“We spent substantial time assuring the integrity of the report, understanding that it would be our living message to those who come after us,” Mueller said. “But it also is a signal, a flag to those of us who have some responsibility in this area to exercise those responsibilities swiftly and don’t let this problem continue to linger as it has over so many years.
Trump, claiming vindication despite the renewal of allegations, focused on his own political fortunes rather than such broader issues. “This was a devastating day for the Democrats,” he said. “The Democrats had nothing and now they have less than nothing.”
Mueller was reluctant to stray beyond his written report, but that didn’t stop Republicans and Democrats from laboring to extract new details.
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 448-page report and weaken Trump’s reelection prospects in ways Mueller’s report did not.
The prosecutor who endured nearly seven hours of hearings was a less forceful public presence than the man who steered the FBI through the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the 12 years after that. But Mueller, 74, was nonetheless skilled enough in the ways of Washington to avoid being goaded into leading questions he didn’t want to answer.
Mueller referred time and again to the wording in
his report.
Was the president lying when he said he had no business ties to Russia? “I’m not going to go into the details of the report along those lines,” Mueller said.
Did you develop any sort of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia? “Again,” Mueller said, “I pass on answering.”
But he was unflinching on the most-critical matters, showing flashes of personality and emotion.
In the opening minutes of the Judiciary Committee hearing, Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, asked about Trump’s multiple claims of vindication by the investigation.
“Did you actually totally exonerate the president?” Nadler asked.
“No,” Mueller replied. When Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman 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 he might
had 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 Trump.
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.”