Mueller: Not Made for TV

I got comfortable in the easy-chair and watched six or seven hours of Mueller yesterday. It started slow and warmed up a little, but this was not a made-for-TV, tl;dr, sound-bite moment in American entertainment. The guy isn't working the social media, he isn't competing for the audience's attention, he clearly does not seek a post-retirement career in show business. He's a lawyer: methodical, unbiased, objective, deliberate, boring.

Mueller was dull, slow, concise, and painfully accurate. He said "I will refer you to the report on that" and "that was not within our purview" more than anything. He did not appear to have the entire nearly-five-hundred-page report memorized. He did not have sarcastic and politically biting responses to dumb questions and point-scoring from Congresspeople, and seemed to be equally annoyed by members of both parties. He had said he did not want to testify, he had said the report was his statement and he would not go beyond it. And he was not going to be pushed into running his mouth in public.

But still, there was something better about seeing him there, and hearing his voice. You know he sat in an office for a couple of years, meeting with lawyers as rich and powerful people lied to them, tried to manipulate them, refused to cooperate, and the team laboriously put the pieces together. They arrested, charged, and convicted a lot of white-collar crooks.

And in the end the report came out, and hardly anybody read it. Instead, the public chose to get it through the filter of the media. The President got in front of the cameras and said, "No collusion, no obstruction," even though that was not what the report said. He claimed to be "totally exonerated" even though Mueller's report said the opposite. Every day the news played contradicting stories and partisans discussed their favorite interpretations, and finally yesterday the author himself sat in front of two committees of Congress and stuck to the facts.

Here is the story that came out. Obama had imposed severe sanctions on Russia, and the oligarchs were losing a lot of money as the Russian economy collapsed, and they wanted to be sure we would elect a President who would lift the sanctions. At the same time, Trump was ... this close ... to closing a deal on a gigantic real-estate project in Moscow, but he needed the approval of Vladimir Putin. For some reason he had decided to run for President right in the middle of getting those papers ready to sign. He knew he can't legally profit from his position as President, so he had to keep the deal quiet. The Russians knew he was breaking the law, but he lied to the American public.

In the meantime, a gang of bottom-feeders joined up with him, people who either owed money to Russians or had some kind of underbelly deals going on with Russia and other authoritarian countries. They ran Trump's campaign, advised him, and went back and forth between Trump and various Russians -- more than a hundred interactions are described in the report. The Russians had some technological skills, which they used to plant propaganda in American media and to break into the Democratic Party's email system, and the rest is history.

Here is a summary, the close of the Intelligence Committee hearing, from Vox with a few edits gleaned from the C-SPAN video:

Schiff: Director Mueller, I want to close out my questions, turn to some of the exchange you had with Mr. [Peter] Welsh [D-VT] a bit earlier. I want to see if we can broaden the aperture at the end of your hearing.

From your testimony today, I’d gather that knowingly accepting assistance from a foreign government during a presidential campaign is an unethical thing to do.

Mueller: And a crime in certain circumstances.

Schiff: To the degree that it undermines our democracy and our institutions, we can agree that it’s also unpatriotic.

Mueller: True.

Schiff: And wrong.

Mueller: True.

Schiff: The behavior of a candidate shouldn’t be merely whether something is criminal. It should be held to a higher standard, you would agree?

Mueller: I’m not going to answer that because it goes to the standards applied by other institutions besides ours.

Schiff: I’m just referring to ethical standards. We should hold our elected officials to a standard higher than mere evidence of criminality.

Mueller: Absolutely.

Schiff: You have served this country for decades, you have taken an oath to defend the Constitution, you hold yourself to a standard of doing what’s right.

Mueller: I would hope.

Schiff: You have. I think we can all see that. Befitting the times, I’m sure your reward will be unending criticism, but we are grateful. The need to act in an ethical manner is not just a moral one, but when people act unethically it also exposes them to compromise particularly in dealing with foreign powers, is that true?

Mueller: True.

Schiff: Because when somebody acts unethically in connection with a foreign partner, that foreign partner can expose their wrongdoing and extort them.

Mueller: True.

Schiff: That unethical conduct can be of a financial nature if you have a financial motive or illicit business dealing, am I right?

Mueller: Yes.

Schiff: It could also just involve deception. If you are lying about something that can be exposed, then you can be blackmailed.

Mueller: Also true.

Schiff: In the case of Michael Flynn, he was secretly doing business with Turkey, correct?

Mueller: Yes.

Schiff: That could open him up to compromise that financial relationship.

Mueller: I presume.

Schiff: He also lied about his discussions with the Russian ambassador and since the Russians were on the other side of the conversation, they could have exposed that, could they not?

Mueller: Yes.

Schiff: If a presidential candidate was doing business in Russia and saying he wasn’t, Russians could expose that too, could they not?

Mueller: I leave that to you.

Schiff: Let’s look at Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for the Kremlin, someone that the Trump organization was in contact with, to make that deal happen. Your report indicates that Michael Cohen had a long conversation on the phone with someone from Dmitry Peskov’s office. Presumably the Russians could record that conversation, could they not?

Mueller: Yes.

Schiff: And so if candidate Trump was saying I have had no dealings with the Russians, but the Russians had a tape-recording, they could expose that, could they not?

Mueller: Yes.

Schiff: That’s the stuff of counterintelligence nightmares, is it not?

Mueller: It has to do with counterintelligence and the need for a strong counterintelligence entity.

Schiff: It does indeed. And when this was revealed that there were these communications notwithstanding the president’s denials, the president was confronted about this and he said two things. First of all, that’s not a crime. But I think you and I have already agreed that shouldn’t be the standard, right, Mr. Mueller?

Mueller: True.

Schiff: The second thing you said was why should I miss out on all those opportunities. I mean, why indeed merely running a presidential campaign, why should you miss out on making all that money, was the import of his statement. Were you ever able to ascertain whether Donald Trump still intends to build that tower when he leaves office?

Mueller: Is that a question, sir?

Schiff: Yes. Were you able to ascertain, because he wouldn’t answer your questions completely, whether or if he ever ended that desire to build that tower?

Mueller: I’m not going to speculate on that.

Schiff: If the president was concerned that if he lost his election, he didn’t want to miss out on that money, might he have the same concern about his reelection?

Mueller: Speculation.

Schiff: The difficulty with this, of course, is we are all left to wonder whether the president is representing us or his financial interests. That concludes my questions.

Mr. Nunes, do you have any concluding remarks? [Nunes, oddly, did not]

Schiff: Director Mueller, let me close by returning to where I began. Thank you for your service and thank you for leading this investigation. The facts you set out in your report and have elucidated here today tell a disturbing tale of a massive Russian intervention in our election of a campaign so eager to win, so driven by greed, that it was willing to accept the help of a hostile foreign power in a presidential election decided by a handful of votes in a few key states.

Your work tells of a campaign so determined to conceal their corrupt use of foreign help that they risked going to jail by lying to you, to the FBI and to Congress about it and, indeed, some have gone to jail over such lies.

And your work speaks of a president who committed countless acts of obstruction of justice that in my opinion and that of many other prosecutors, had it been anyone else in the country, they would have been indicted. Notwithstanding the many things you have addressed today and in your report, there were some questions you could not answer given the constraints you’re operating under.

You would not tell us whether you would have indicted the president but for the OLC opinion that you could not. So the Justice Department will have to make that decision when the president leaves office, both as to the crime of obstruction of justice and as to the campaign finance fraud scheme that individual one directed and coordinated and for which Michael Cohen went to jail.

You would not tell us whether the president should be impeached, nor did we ask you since it is our responsibility to determine the proper remedy for the conduct outlined in your report. Whether we decide to impeach the president in the house or we do not, we must take any action necessary to protect the country while he is in office.

You would not tell us the results or whether other bodies looked into Russian compromise in the form of money laundering, so we must do so. You would not tell us whether the counterintelligence investigation revealed whether people still serving within the administration pose a risk of compromise and should never have been given a security clearance, so we must find out.

We did not bother to ask whether financial inducements from any gulf nations were influencing this US policy since it is outside the four corners of your report, and so we must find out. But one thing is clear from your report, your testimony from director Wray’s statements yesterday. The Russians massively intervened in 2016 and they are prepared to do so again in voting that is set to begin a mere eighth months from now.

The president seems to welcome the help again and so we must make all efforts to harden our elections infrastructure, to ensure there is a paper trail for all voting, to deter the Russians from meddling, to discover it when they do, to disrupt it and to make them pay. Protecting the sanctity of our elections begins however with the recognition that accepting foreign help is disloyal to our country, unethical and wrong.

We cannot control what the Russians do, not completely, but we can decide what we do and that this centuries-old experiment we call American democracy is worth cherishing.

Director Mueller, thank you again for being here today.

Mueller would not say the word "impeach" in the hearings, but it became clear that he felt the report had presented sufficient evidence for Congress to use in impeachment, since DOJ does not allow a sitting President to be subjected to the normal justice system. The depth and breadth of the Trump criminal enterprise was brought to light in the hearings, and it seems that the House of Representatives is obligated to consider the feasibility of impeachment, especially since the Trump administration is refusing to comply with subpoenas.