Democrats should get Mueller evidence, judges rule

House Democrats scored a major legal victory Tuesday as a federal appeals court panel granted them permission to access grand jury secrets from Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

The 2-1 ruling from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision in favor of the House’s ability to see the deleted passages in the public version of the Mueller report, the 448-page tome that describes the two-year investigation into potential links between Trump’s campaign and Russia. The report, released in April 2019, also examines President Donald Trump’s attempts to stymie the Russia probe.

If it stands, the ruling would give lawmakers access to all the report’s blacked-out words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and entire pages — nearly 1,000 portions in all — as well as underlying interviews and memos cited in Mueller’s review.

The Democrats’ courtroom win, nearly a year in the making, is a symbolic blow to Trump and his sweeping claims that his administration can block Congress from talking to witnesses and accessing information.

But the sting was largely taken out of the decision by the fact it came nearly five weeks after the Senate acquitted Trump on largely unrelated impeachment articles involving his dealings with Ukraine. Additionally, the House’s victory Tuesday does not guarantee that lawmakers will get to immediately see the full range of Mueller’s evidence. Appeals from the Justice Department are all but certain, and the case could still face Supreme Court review.

Nevertheless, the House in its legal filings argued that it could still consider new articles of impeachment against Trump. The deletions could shed further light on the campaign’s attempts to connect with WikiLeaks, or the infamoust Trump Tower meeting between senior campaign staffers and a Russian attorney promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent.

On Tuesday, the majority of the appeals court said that reasoning was sufficient to authorize the release of the grand jury secrets. Courts, according to the majority opinion, should not “micromanage” the House’s need for information in the context of an impeachment investigation.

“The courts cannot tell the House how to conduct its impeachment investigation or what lines of inquiry to pursue, or how to prosecute its case before the Senate,” Judge Judith Rogers wrote in an opinion joined by Judge Thomas Griffith.

Rogers rejected the Justice Department’s argument that impeachment is not the kind of court proceeding where grand jury materials are routinely available.

“The constitutional text confirms that a Senate impeachment trial is a judicial proceeding,” Rogers wrote. “The term ‘judicial proceeding’ has long and repeatedly been interpreted broadly.”

Judge Neomi Rao, the only Trump appointee on the panel, dissented. She said the lower court had authority to lift the veil of secrecy on the grand jury materials, but not to order the Justice Department to disclose them to Congress.

“The Committee can point to no statutory entitlement to this information and the judicial relief it seeks is contrary to historical practice and the separation of powers,” Rao wrote.

Rao also repeatedly cited the Senate’s decision to acquit Trump on two articles of impeachment last month as a development that could diminish the House’s need to access Mueller’s evidence.

“A reasonable observer might wonder why we are deciding this case at this time. After all, the Committee sought these materials preliminary to an impeachment proceeding and the Senate impeachment trial has concluded,” Rao wrote. “Why is this controversy not moot? The majority simply turns a blind eye to these very public events.”

But the majority rejected this suggestion, noting that the House had authorized its committees to pursue all ongoing impeachment investigations — including a Judiciary Committee probe related to Mueller — and could consider additional charges against Trump if the new evidence warrants it.

The decision from a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit came just 10 days after a mostly-overlapping panel of judges ruled for Trump in another closely-watched case stemming from the Trump-Russia probe: an attempt to get the courts to enforce a subpoena forcing testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn, one of Mueller’s star witnesses.

That panel ruled unanimously that the courts should not attempt to referee subpoena fights between Congress and the executive branch. The House has asked the full, 11-judge bench of the D.C. Circuit to take up the issue.

The McGahn decision is likely of greater lasting impact, since it affects most fights between Congress and the executive branch over access to information. Conversely, the the issue of lawmakers’ access to grand jury-related records arises only occasionally.

The legal battle over the Mueller evidence emerged from Democrats impeachment probe that followed Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In the Mueller evidence case, the appeals court upheld U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell’s order that the House Judiciary Committee should be allowed to see the special counsel’s final report in full. The judge also ordered that the House be allowed to see the grand jury testimony or subpoenaed records supporting those statements.

The Justice Department did permit House members to see most of the redacted information in the Mueller report, but insisted that it could not share the grand jury information absent a court order. Democrats pressed Attorney General Bill Barr to seek such an order, but he declined and instead fought the House in court.

While Justice Department officials began sharing some of the underlying FBI interview reports — known as 302s — with Congress, that process bogged down after the House formalized its impeachment inquiry last October and the Trump White House stopped cooperating with impeachment-related investigations.

House Democrats had repeatedly pressed the D.C. Circuit to address the McGahn and Mueller cases before their impeachment proceedings concluded.

The court heard arguments in both cases on Jan. 3, days after the House impeached Trump. But ultimately, it held back from issuing opinions on those subjects while the Democrat-led impeachment effort rolled forward, culminating with Trump’s acquittal in early February.

The much-anticipated rulings have arrived in recent weeks as the House Democratic investigators continue shedding their impeachment-focused staffers and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi redirects the chamber’s agenda toward kitchen-table issues like the economy and health care.

How the Democrats will actually make practical use of their win remains unclear. During impeachment, the House made only a glancing reference to the Mueller probe in the two articles seeking Trump’s removal from office over his alleged attempts to pressure Ukraine’s leader into launching investigations into his political rivals.

But House lawyers also told the federal judges that lawmakers could still pass additional articles of impeachment based on the information they secure from the Mueller case.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/judges-rule-democrats-should-get-mueller-evidence-125008
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Trump allies target Mueller team, one by one

For months, a loose network of pro-Trump commentators and outside agitators has been urging the president to purge his administration of anyone and everyone involved in the Russia probe.

They’ve celebrated as many of the FBI and Justice Department officials involved in the investigation have left government. And now, with an angry and newly liberated President Donald Trump seeking retribution in the wake of his impeachment acquittal, they’re pressing him to finish the job.

“Why would they expect not to be fired?” said Kurt Schlicter, a conservative political commentator and Trump supporter, referring to the roughly half-dozen prosecutors and officials who worked in special counsel Robert Mueller’s office and are still employed by the Justice Department.

Trump’s allies have long called for a “cleaning out” of DOJ and FBI, aimed at career officials perceived as hostile to the president. Several of Trump’s top targets have been forced out, including former FBI Director James Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe, and former FBI agent Peter Strzok, all of whom worked on the Russia probe.

But the calls for a purge intensified this month after four career prosecutors recommended a sentence of at least 7 years in prison for Trump associate Roger Stone, who was convicted last year of making false statements to Congress, obstruction and witness intimidation.

All four of the Stone prosecutors quit the case after their sentencing recommendation, which followed federal guidelines, was overruled by Attorney General Bill Barr, and one resigned from DOJ altogether.

“It’s totally unclear to me why any members of the Mueller team need to remain in the Trump DOJ,” the pro-Trump conservative blogger Will Chamberlain wrote after news broke of the Stone sentencing recommendation. (Three of the four Stone prosecutors, Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, and Jonathan Kravis, worked for Mueller.)

The MAGA punditry’s outsized influence over the president means their campaign against the so-called Mueller “holdovers” is likely not falling on deaf ears, especially given Trump’s fixation with what his defenders and detractors are saying about his administration in their frequent appearances on his favorite TV programs.

“I think that the White House understands that it has the support of the insurgent conservative punditry in this fight, because we see what the fight is,” said Schlicter, whose recent columns on the subject have run under headlines like “Time for Trump to Get His Godfather On” and “Burn Down the DOJ and Start Over.”

Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative activist group Judicial Watch, tweets several times a day about alleged “deep state corruption” at the Justice Department and last week described Stone’s sentencing recommendation as “Mueller holdover extortion.” Trump retweeted Fitton’s accusations of corruption at DOJ and the need to “clean house” there nearly a dozen times on Wednesday morning alone.

Sam Nunberg, a GOP consultant and former Trump campaign adviser who was interviewed in the Mueller probe, suggested in an interview that the “Mueller team” should not handle any Trump-related matters. And GOP operative Arthur Schwartz, a close friend of Donald Trump Jr. who has been described as the eldest son’s “fixer,” said of the career officials in question: “I think they should all be investigated.” Schwartz was among the group of lawyers who celebrated the president’s Senate acquittal at the Trump hotel in D.C., along with his defense team.

At this point, it’s not clear who is echoing whom. Trump has lambasted the prosecutions of his associates—Stone, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort—as spearheaded by “Mueller people,” and has publicly attacked the judge who oversaw several Mueller-related cases, including Stone’s.

“Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure? How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!” Trump tweeted last week.

Both the Russia and Clinton email server investigations were reviewed separately by DOJ’s inspector general, who found no evidence that political bias influenced the department’s handling of the probes.

But Attorney General Bill Barr has already launched reviews of the origins of the Russia investigation and the FBI’s handling of Flynn. But his intervention in the Stone case has bought him little reprieve from Trump, whose incessant tweeting on his former aide’s plight spurred Barr to rebuke the president in an extraordinary interview last week on ABC News.

Fitton, a regular guest on Fox News, declined to say in an interview how often he speaks to the White House. But he said his “guess” is that Trump is “hearing all sorts of voices” on this issue.

“This is a straightforward issue,” he said. “The president runs the Justice Department and there are a lot of people who don’t want the Justice Department to investigate Democrats. All of this noise is designed to make it difficult for the Justice Department to investigate Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and those implicated in the illegal spying of Donald Trump.”

Hillary Clinton was investigated and cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the FBI in 2016, and the vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, did not break any laws by sitting on a Ukrainian gas company’s board, according to the former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko. The Justice Department’s independent Inspector General found more than a dozen errors or omissions in the FBI’s warrant to surveil a Trump campaign adviser, but concluded that the Russia probe was properly predicated and found no evidence that Trump himself was spied on.

To Trump and his allies, though, none of that is enough—any officials associated with the Russia and Mueller probes cannot be fair, they say, and should either be investigated, removed, or both.

“These were Mueller prosecutors, and the whole Mueller investigation was illegally set up based on a phony and now fully discredited Fake Dossier, lying and forging documents to the FISA Court, and many other things,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning, incorrectly claiming that a set of raw intelligence reports outlining Trump’s alleged ties to Russia commissioned by Democrats was used to open the FBI’s initial investigation (the inspector general found that the dossier was not used as the basis to open the probe).

“Everything having to do with this fraudulent investigation is badly tainted and, in my opinion, should be thrown out,” Trump wrote.

DOJ veterans say the outrage from the president and his allies reflects a misunderstanding of how the department works—supposed concerns over rogue line attorneys ring hollow given DOJ policies requiring sentencing recommendations to be reached after consultation with high-level leadership, said one former senior national security official.

In the Stone case, prosecutors consulted longtime Barr aide Timothy Shea, recently installed as the new U.S. Attorney in D.C., before submitting the sentencing recommendation. Despite reportedly disagreeing with the prosecutors, Shea did not tell Barr or Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen about the recommendation until after it was submitted to the court, according to the New York Times. Several conservative opinion writers, including the Federalist’s Sean Davis and the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel, accused the prosecutors of essentially going rogue.

But as the Wall Street Journal’s own reporting noted last week, prosecutors rarely diverge from the sentencing recommendations issued by the court Probation Office. And Stone did not strike a cooperation deal with the government that might have softened the prosecutors’ position.

John Dowd, a former Trump lawyer who remains in touch with the White House, characterized the line attorneys in the Stone case as “insubordinate,” and “the same crowd of prosecutors wedded to the Mueller agenda” who need to be “cleaned out” from DOJ.

“And Bill Barr is doing that,” Dowd said.

Pro-Trump commentators have also zeroed in on Brandon van Grack, a prosecutor who was on Mueller’s team and is still handling the Flynn case for the government.

“Why is Van Grack still on this case?” conservative commentator Mollie Hemingway tweeted on Feb. 12. The president’s defenders have accused the FBI of setting a perjury trap for the retired general, and Flynn is now seeking to withdraw his guilty plea on the grounds of alleged prosecutorial misconduct.

Stone, meanwhile, is seeking a new trial altogether. But his complaint isn’t with the prosecutors—it’s with the foreperson of the jury that convicted him on all counts. The foreperson, Tomeka Hart, has since been identified as a one-time Democratic congressional candidate who was critical of Trump on social media. But the defense knew her identity throughout the pre-trial proceedings—where she disclosed her run for Congress—and didn’t challenge her fitness to serve on the jury.

Trump has targeted Hart following Fox News segments about her past criticism of the president. He tweeted on February 13 that she “had significant bias” and that “this is not looking good for the ‘Justice’ department,” and tagged Fox and Friends and Fox News. He also tagged Fox and Friends in a tweet about Hart days later, quoting commentator Andrew Napolitano saying “it’s obvious” Stone should get a new trial due to Hart’s “unambiguous bias.”

Stone is still set to be sentenced on Thursday, Judge Jackson said on Tuesday. But the execution of the sentence will be deferred until the motions for a new trial are resolved, and conservative blogger Mike Cernovich, citing concerns about Hart, told POLITICO that he planned to file to have all the papers related to the Stone jury selection unsealed.

Nunberg, the former Trump aide, noted that he had been questioned by Aaron Zelensky, and pointed to no evidence that the former Mueller team member exhibited any bias.

But for Nunberg — as for the others — mere suspicions were enough to argue for his dismissal.

“I personally liked Aaron,” he said. “I found him highly professional, very smart. They had facts, yes, but I believe that they had an agenda … They were trying to take down Trump.”

Josh Gerstein contributed reporting.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/trump-allies-target-mueller-team-116168
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Impeachment is about to get a Robert Mueller reprise

Right now, impeachment is all about Ukraine. But after Thanksgiving, prepare for a Robert Mueller reprise.

Now that House Democrats have wrapped up public hearings on President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign to get Ukraine to launch politically advantageous investigations, there are plans to hold at least one public impeachment hearing on Trump’s misdeeds as alleged in the special counsel’s report.

It’s a gathering that could fuel articles of impeachment beyond those tied to the Ukraine controversy. Democrats say they have new Mueller-related fodder after Roger Stone’s recent trial raised questions about whether Trump provided false statements to the special counsel’s team. And the hearing could even feature a star witness — former White House counsel Don McGahn. A judge is set to rule in the coming days on whether McGahn must comply with a House subpoena.

House leadership signaled the plans in court filings and oral arguments this week, as the Democrats’ attorneys fought to get McGahn’s testimony, as well as access to more of the evidence Mueller used to write his final report.

“This is something that’s unbelievably serious and it’s happening right now, very fast,” House counsel Doug Letter, who consults closely with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told a federal appeals court during a hearing in the Mueller evidence case.

To close observers, a shift back to the Mueller probe isn’t all that surprising. Democratic leaders never took the 2016 Russia investigation off the table as an impeachment springboard, even as attention shifted to the Ukraine scandal.

Much of Mueller’s work is already part of the Democrats’ impeachment record. The former special counsel and his final report are mentioned a dozen times in the House resolution approved last month kick-starting the current public hearing process. Democrats noted in the resolution that Mueller “documented evidence strongly indicating that President Trump engaged in a course of conduct designed to obstruct the special counsel’s investigation, including any investigation into the president’s conduct.”

Democrats have picked up new details since then. At Stone’s trial, which concluded Nov. 15 with a conviction of the longtime Trump associate for lying to Congress and witness tampering, new evidence and testimony showed Trump and his campaign aides knew more about WikiLeaks’ plans during the 2016 presidential race then they have let on. That includes three Trump-Stone phone calls around the time that Julian Assange’s document dumps were damaging the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Democrats say the revelations spotlight a potential contradiction in Trump’s written responses last November to Mueller’s team.

“I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with [Stone], nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign,” Trump wrote.

Democrats have been arguing in court that they deserve access to Mueller’s underlying evidence in order to determine whether Trump did actually lie. And Letter, the top House counsel, told a federal appeals court on Monday that the House needs a swift resolution because of the impeachment time crunch.

Similar arguments came up in a separate House lawsuit Democrats launched in an attempt to force McGahn to testify. In a court filing on Tuesday, Letter stressed the urgent schedule, writing that the Judiciary Committee plans to have its own round of impeachment hearings after the public Ukraine hearings conclude.

Democrats, he wrote, “would aim to obtain Mr. McGahn’s testimony at that time,” meaning “there is an urgent need for final resolution of the matter now pending before this Court.”

It appears Democrats will get the speedy decision they want. U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson this week promised a ruling by Monday on the McGahn lawsuit.

But even if McGahn is ordered to testify, that ruling could be put on hold until any appeals are sorted out. And a source close to McGahn said the ex-Trump aide won’t agree to testify until that process is worked out, possibly delaying things yet again.

The lawsuit seeking Mueller’s evidence faces a long timeline, too. While Democrats won a lower court ruling in the case, a hearing is scheduled for Jan. 3 to consider whether that ruling should stand. Trump’s Justice Department, should it lose there, can also try to appeal to a full panel of judges to review the case.

In the end, both cases could end up at the Supreme Court, putting a final resolution outside Democrats’ preferred impeachment window.

“I think that might be asking a lot for the American people to continue to go through impeachment for another six to eight months as we move forward toward a presidential election,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, told POLITICO. “I don’t think the American people want that.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), another Judiciary Committee member, said in an interview that lawmakers can move forward on Mueller-related articles of impeachment without final judgments in the case.

“It’s going to be challenging depending on the timing, but we do have a lot of evidence in front of us and we’ll move forward with whatever we have based on the timing we have,” Jayapal said. “Hopefully, the courts continue to act quickly.”

While they intend to lean in on the Mueller issue in the coming weeks, Democrats still haven’t made a final decision on whether to include any impeachment articles tied to the special counsel’s findings.

“That to me is the million-dollar question,” said a person close to the House impeachment process. The challenge, this person said, revolves around turning all the public evidence from Mueller’s probe into one or more impeachment articles that can win a majority vote on the floor.

“Is there a way to quickly process and dispose of that in this concise schedule? I’m not sure I know of a way, but there may be one,” the person added.

Pelosi’s plan has been for House leadership to be an impeachment clearinghouse after six committees — Intelligence, Judiciary, Oversight and Reform, Foreign Affairs, Financial Services and Ways and Means — complete their review of allegations of presidential misdeeds and abuses of power.

Ultimately, the Judiciary panel — which spent the bulk of its time in 2019 examining Mueller’s work — will vote on any eventual articles of impeachment. Any upcoming hearings on the committee, which is led by Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), likely would follow the same model the Intelligence Committee used in its Ukraine hearings and feature questioning by staff counsel.

Trump’s GOP allies on Capitol Hill say they are not alarmed about a shift on the impeachment front back to the Mueller probe — a topic they’ve trashed since long before the special counsel’s findings were made public.

“The American people are so done with all this stuff,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Trump’s most voluble defender during the Ukraine hearings, said in an interview. “It’s been one thing after the other and nothing ever works the way the Democrats promise it’s going to work.”

The transition in the impeachment proceedings back to the special counsel’s work also shouldn’t be that jarring, considering the Russia probe’s fingerprints are all over the Ukraine scandal.

Trump’s personal attorney in the Russia probe, Rudy Giuliani, started pushing earlier this year for Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, a potential Trump 2020 rival, and his son Hunter as the special counsel’s work wrapped up. Then, with Trump’s backing, Giuliani started working with some U.S. diplomats to get Ukraine to launch such a probe, as well as a probe into discredited theories that Ukraine had framed Russia for political hacks during the 2016 U.S. election.

On July 25, Trump then asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to open these investigations. The request, which came one day after Mueller publicly testified before Congress, is now at the center of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

Trump’s defense in the Ukraine matter mirrors his response to the special counsel probe, including his on-again-off-again offer to give sworn testimony and assertions that as president he can act however he wants without legal consequences.

Some members of Mueller’s team have even popped back up to needle the president over the Ukraine investigation.

Andrew Weissmann, who served as a lead investigator and prosecutor during Mueller’s Russia probe, recently signed on as an MSNBC legal commentator and has been giving his thoughts on the recent House impeachment hearings.

“If it is true what the Democrats are claiming, what the president is doing completely antithetical to the bipartisan view that the rule of law should apply in this country and across the world,” Weissmann told NPR last weekend.

Democrats’ efforts to reveal more about the Mueller probe also may live on beyond the House impeachment effort, which party leaders appear intent on completing by year’s end.

“It’s still very important that we pursue it, even though it may not be in any accord with any timeline that continues to develop in terms of impeachment based on the Ukrainian matter,” Johnson said. “History needs to know what Congress did to confront the abuse of power that was right up under its nose.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/22/impeachment-robert-mueller-072698
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Trump being investigated over whether he lied to Mueller as impeachment pressure mounts

Probe appears to be part of broader impeachment inquiry

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-mueller-impeachment-russia-investigation-house-court-latest-a9207976.html
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Judge rules DOJ must turn over Mueller grand jury material to House Democrats

A federal judge has ruled that the Justice Department must turn over former special counsel Robert Mueller’s grand jury evidence to the House Judiciary Committee, a victory for Democrats in their effort to investigate whether President Donald Trump obstructed the long-running Russia probe.

Beryl Howell, the chief federal judge in Washington ordered the DOJ to provide by Oct. 30 “[a]ll portions of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election that were redacted pursuant to” grand jury restrictions.

The order also requires the Justice Department to provide “any underlying transcripts or exhibits referenced in the portions of the Mueller Report that were redacted” pursuant to those restrictions.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/25/judge-rules-doj-must-turn-over-mueller-grand-jury-material-to-house-democrats-000299
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Judge signals interest in removing Mueller report redactions

A federal judge signaled Monday he’s considering removing the Mueller report’s redactions.

During more than two hours of oral arguments in Washington, District Judge Reggie Walton appeared on several occasions to side with attorneys for BuzzFeed and the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, which are seeking to remove the black bars covering nearly 1,000 items in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s final 448-page final report.

Walton didn’t issue an opinion from the bench on the case, which centers on a pair of consolidated lawsuits filed against the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act. But the judge, an appointee of President George W. Bush, sounded increasingly skeptical of the government’s arguments pressing him to leave the redactions untouched.

“That’s what open government is about,” Walton said during one exchange, citing the resolution of a 2008 sex crimes case against financier Jeffrey Epstein as an example of how obfuscating the reasons behind not prosecuting high-profile people generates public distrust in the country’s criminal justice system.

Indeed, EPIC and BuzzFeed filed their lawsuit in order to uncover such information — the redacted explanation of why the special counsel didn’t bring charges against the likes of Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner. And in court Monday, their attorneys argued that disclosing these details would help resolve whether the president is right to claim the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was a “witch hunt.”

“It’s something that frankly ripped this country apart,” argued Matt Topic, an attorney for BuzzFeed, regarding the competing and often bitter partisan claims surrounding the credibility of Mueller’s investigation. “The people deserve to know as much as they possibly can.”

Monday’s court arguments represent one of the many ways the Mueller investigation continues to linger even though the special counsel’s office shuttered earlier this spring. House Judiciary Committee Democrats last month asked the chief judge of the D.C. District Court to issue an order to let them see the underlying materials the special counsel used. The Democrats said they need the information to make a decision about whether to impeach the president.

While Walton has the power to issue an opinion that goes directly to the BuzzFeed and EPIC lawsuit, he’s also weighing another incremental step the two organizations have requested. Essentially, they asked Walton to review the unredacted Mueller report to see if the exemptions the Justice Department is citing to block release of the full document actually line up with what’s allowed under the law.

Several of the judge’s questions appeared designed to understand what he’d get out of doing that kind of analysis himself. But he also made several comments over the course of the hearing suggesting where he may fall.

For example, Walton said he had “some concerns” about trying to reconcile public statements Trump and Attorney General William Barr have made about the report with the content of the report itself.

The judge pointed to Trump’s claims that Mueller found “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia and the president’s insistence that he had been exonerated from a possible obstruction of justice charge. These comments, Walton said, appeared bolstered by Barr’s description of Mueller’s findings during a DOJ news conference — before the public and media could read the document for themselves.

“It’d seem to be inconsistent with what the report itself said,” Walton said. The judge also cited a letter Mueller’s office sent to Barr questioning the attorney general’s decision to release a four-page summary of the investigation’s conclusions that “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance” of the report.

Separately on Monday, Walton raised questions about a DOJ submission defending the agency’s decision to black out large portions of the Mueller report.

“I also worked for the department,” Walton said. “Sometimes the body does what the head wants.”

Courtney Enlow, a DOJ trial attorney, defended the Mueller report redactions and insisted they all fall inside the exemptions allowed under FOIA, such as the need to keep grand jury information private and protect the government’s investigative methods. The government can also withhold information for national security purposes or to maintain people’s privacy.

Enlow argued that additional disclosures would harm several ongoing investigations Mueller handed off to other federal prosecutors. And she warned that releasing redacted information in the special counsel report could undercut longtime Trump aide Roger Stone’s ability to get a fair trial in his case that centers on lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing justice. He is set to stand trial in November.

“Nothing more is required here, your honor,” Enlow said.

Enlow also said Buzzfeed and EPIC lawyers are “speculating” as they seek to highlight potential disclosures that would come should the redactions be removed from the report, which she noted were made with help from Mueller’s team.

“This is not a singular person who was making decisions with redactions,” she said.

At the conclusion of the hearing, Walton acknowledged the likelihood that whatever he does will generate an appeal. “I’ll try to get this done as quickly as I can, so we can have this matter resolved one way or another,” he said.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/05/judge-signals-interest-in-removing-mueller-report-redactions-1448331
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How to stream the Mueller testimony

Robert Mueller famously stated that “the report is my testimony” about potential obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump. However, Congress was having none of that and subpoenaed the former special counsel to testify before the House Judicia…

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/24/how-to-stream-the-mueller-testimony/
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Trump administration tells Mueller to limit what he tells congress about Russia investigation

The US justice department has demanded that Robert Mueller limit his congressional testimony to “the boundaries of [his] public report”, ahead of the former special counsel’s appearance before two House of Representatives’ committees.Mr Mueller will appear at the highly anticipated hearings, in front of the judiciary and intelligence committees, on Wednesday.Bradley Weinsheimer, the US assistant deputy attorney general, warned the 74-year-old that his testimony “must remain within the boundaries of your public report because matters within the scope of your investigation were covered by executive privilege.”“These privileges would include discussion about investigative steps or decisions made during your investigation not otherwise described in the public version of your report,” Mr Weinsheimer added, in a letter sent to Mr Mueller.The department’s letter comes just weeks after Mr Trump issued a similar warning on Twitter.“Robert Mueller is being asked to testify yet again,” the president said earlier this month.“He said he could only stick to the Report, & that is what he would and must do. After so much testimony & total transparency, this Witch Hunt must now end. No more Do Overs. No Collusion, No Obstruction.”Democrats are expected to ask the former special counsel about Donald Trump’s alleged misconduct.Mr Mueller’s public report, published in March 2019, discussed numerous examples of contact between Russian officials and Mr Trump’s campaign, but found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy.The report also laid out examples of 10 incidents in which the US president sought to hinder the probe.Despite his findings, Mr Mueller did not draw a conclusion on whether Donald Trump obstructed justice.William Barr, the US attorney general and a member of the Trump administration, later ruled that there was not enough evidence to bring obstruction charges against the president.Mr Barr’s ruling has proved highly controversial and has been called into question by Democrats.Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic chair of the judiciary committee, said he thought there was “substantial evidence” that Mr Trump had committed “high crimes and misdemeanours”.Several Democrats in the House of Representatives are pressing to impeach the president, but such evidence would be required for proceedings to begin.The Democratic leadership has avoided an impeachment attempt, as Nancy Pelosi, the house speaker, believes it would harm the party’s 2020 electoral chances.But the party remains split, with progressives such as Al Green continuing to call for the president’s removal.Mr Mueller completed his investigation into Russian election interference in March 2019, following a probe which took nearly two years.A spokesperson for Mr Mueller said no one at the justice department, the White House or congress would read the 74-year-old’s statement before he delivered it on Wednesday.The former special counsel has been using offices at his former law firm WilmerHale and working with a small team to prepare for the back-to-back hearings.Mr Mueller has previously said that he will not go beyond the content of the report in his congressional testimony.“He will come well prepared,” the spokesperson added.“His team has been working on this for a while and they will be ready for whatever comes their way.” Additional reporting by agencies

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-administration-tells-mueller-limit-062413679.html
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Trump says Mueller should not be allowed to tell congress about his obstruction: 'It will be bad for him'

‘In the end it will be bad for him and the phony Democrats in Congress,’ tweets president

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-mueller-hearing-russia-collusion-twitter-us-president-democrats-congress-a9015651.html
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Mueller testimony on Russia meddling investigation postponed

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appearance in Congress next week to testify on the Russia election meddling investigation and allegations of obstruction by President Donald Trump has been postponed, the House Judiciary Committee announced Friday. Mueller was originally scheduled to appear before the committee on July 17. Completed in March after a more than two-year investigation into Russian election meddling in the 2016 presidential election, the Mueller report documents numerous instances of attempted collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia, but found no grounds for criminal conspiracy charges.

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/mueller-testimony-russia-meddling-investigation-postponed-media-161537897.html
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Mueller Missed the Crime: Trump’s Campaign Coordinated With Russia

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Photos GettyEver since the release of the Mueller Report, countless commentators have implored everyone to just ReadtheReport. The problem is not who is reading it—the problem is the report itself, and its many errors. Robert Mueller made a significant legal error and, based on the facts he found, he should have identified Trump campaign felonies. Mueller’s errors meant that, first, he failed to conclude that the Trump campaign criminally coordinated with Russia; second, he failed to indict campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates for felony campaign coordination (see in a concise timeline below); third, the 10 acts of felony obstruction in Volume II fell flat among the general public because it lacked compelling context of these underlying crimes between the campaign and Russia. On top of these errors, the former special counsel said he deliberately wrote the report to be unclear because it would be unfair to make clear criminal accusations against a president. The bottom line is that the Mueller Report is a failure not because of Congress or because of public apathy, but because it failed to get the law, the facts, or even the basics of writing right. When Mueller testifies before Congress on July 17, he should be pressed on all of this.The DOJ’s initial appointment explicitly tasked Mueller with investigating campaign “coordination,” and it is not too much to ask that he get the law of “coordination” right. The report stated that “‘coordination’ does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express.” However, Congress purposely sought to prevent such narrow interpretations: in 2002, it passed a statute directing that campaign finance regulations “shall not require agreement or formal collaboration to establish coordination.” The Federal Election Commission established the regulations for the implementation of the statute:  “Coordinated means made in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate,” with no need to show any kind of agreement. Outside spending for coordinated communications is an in-kind contribution, and foreign contributions are completely prohibited. And Congress made the criminal penalties unmistakably clear: “Any person who knowingly and willfully commits a violation of any provision of this Act” commits a crime. The Supreme Court upheld these limits in McConnell v. FEC with crucial observations about the functional role of suggestions, rather than agreements: “[E]xpenditures made after a wink or nod often will be as useful to the candidate as cash.” This timeline is full of suggestions far more explicit than winks and nods. If Trump Weren’t President, He Would Already Be ChargedAs the Supreme Court acknowledged, this is not about bribery and quid pro quo; it’s about outsourcing a consistent campaign messaging and expenses to known allies. It seems Mueller did not hire any legal experts with experience in campaign finance regulation. Given that this investigation was about campaign crimes, this appears to a revealing oversight with serious consequences. In addition to ignoring these rules, Mueller also made a major organizational error: Volume I separates the events of Russian hacking from the actions of the Trump campaign. The entire point of a “conspiracy and coordination” investigation was the relationship between the two. The ongoing pattern of signal or invitation with response, of cause-and-effect, gets utterly lost in the hundreds of pages of details, the siloing of each character, and especially in the omissions and the errors.  Here is a short, concise timeline of 10 events to show that Mueller found criminal coordination in the back-and-forth between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Puzzlingly, Mueller omitted some of these events from Volume I, but revealed them in other Mueller team indictments or from Volume II, another strange error. * * *First, keep in mind some crucial background context of coordination. Trump made frequent positive public comments about Vladimir Putin, especially from 2013 through the campaign. Also keep in mind the active concealed negotiations for Trump Tower Moscow between Trump associates and Russians connected to the Kremlin from June 2015 through June 2016. * * *1. March-May 2016 in the Trump campaign* * *Trump hired Paul Manafort as campaign chairman in March. Manafort had well-known direct contacts to Putin’s orbit, namely his old oligarch patron Oleg Deripaska. As the report states, “Manafort stayed in touch with these [Russian] contacts during the campaign period through [alleged Russian spy] Konstantin Kilimnik.” In late April, Trump foreign policy adviser George “Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud… that the Russian government had obtained ‘dirt’ on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.” Papadopoulos indicated that the campaign had “received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to candidate Clinton.” In response to Papadopolous’ suggestions of a meeting between Trump and Putin in late May, Manafort writes an email that Trump should not go himself, to avoid sending a public “signal,” but Manafort later makes his own secret contacts through Kilimnik. This context shows Manafort’s awareness of the Papadopolous contacts, circumstantially about the emails, and the negative consequences of public signals.  * * *2. March-May 2016 in Russia* * *The report identifies this same overlapping period as the peak and pivotal hacking period by Russian military intelligence (GRU), as well as a period of a pro-Trump social media campaign by Russian agents using aliases. But the report fails to show the overlap with these Trump campaign events. * * *3. June 3-7: Trump Tower meeting scheduled, Trump announces a major speech on Clinton* * *On June 3, Rob Goldstone, the music producer for a Russian oligarch’s son, emailed Trump Jr. about the chief prosecutor of Russia offering to “provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” He responded: “[I]f it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”Mueller: My Hands Were Tied on Charging TrumpOn June 7 at 5:16 pm, Trump Jr. scheduled the meeting for June 9. That very same evening, Trump announced: “I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and… discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.” The report says the investigation “did not find evidence that the original idea for the speech was connected to the anticipated June 9 meeting.” Many prosecutors would have drawn the opposite inference from Trump Jr.’s subsequent lies about the meeting and Trump’s directions to him to lie as not only felony obstruction but also as evidence of consciousness of guilt and more likely Trump’s contemporaneous knowledge of the meeting. But even if we give Trump (and Mueller) the benefit of the doubt, the next events still show coordination. * * *4. June 8-9: DCLeaks launches, Don Jr. meets Russian for dirt on Clinton and talks sanctions* * *A day after Trump’s announcement and his son’s scheduling of a meeting with Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russians immediately launched DCLeaks.com to spread emails that its agents had illegally hacked. This information is in the Mueller indictment of 12 GRU agents, but oddly, the report omits this precise timing. Whether or not Trump knew of the Trump Tower meeting, he could have perceived that his announcement of a speech on Clinton was immediately followed by DCLeaks, and it became one of the major sources of leaks all summer. And the principal campaign officers who met with Russian agents about Clinton information the next day surely could have perceived this cause-and-effect, too. The next day, Trump Jr., Manafort, and Jared Kushner met Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower. Manafort’s notes from the meeting indicate that the main subject was lifting sanctions on Russia. Unhelpfully, the report buries Manafort’s meeting notes in a footnote with none of this crucial context or commentary. Even without an explicit quid pro quo, the premise of the meeting was “dirt” on Clinton (a quo) and lifting sanctions (quid). A meeting between top Trump campaign officials and Russian government representatives was at least implicitly a suggestion, more than the kind of “wink” and “nod” that the Supreme Court condemned in 2003. The unfolding events in the next day and next months would show acting in concert and coordination. * * *5. June 14: DNC announces Russian hack, Guccifer2.0 launches blog* * *Five days after the Trump Tower meeting, the DNC announced Russian hackers had breached the computer network, and its investigators blame GRU officers. The next day, “GRU officers using the persona Guccifer 2.0” created a blog to release the stolen documents, doing so between June 15 and October 18. Yet again, Mueller failed to put this event in the context of the Trump Tower meeting and Trump’s announcement of a forthcoming speech on the Clintons. Someone who knew of the meeting would have seen clear cause-and-effect. * * *6. July 22: first DNC emails are published, Roger Stone is directed to find out more* * *WikiLeaks “released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network”, three days before the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. After the release, a senior campaign official “was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information” WikiLeaks had. “Stone thereafter told the Trump Campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by [WikiLeaks].” This information was in the indictment of Stone. Presumably this detail is redacted from the report, but given its potential significance to the investigation, Mueller should be asked to specify who was directed and who did the directing.  * * *7. July 27: “Russia, if you’re listening…” followed by more hacking* * *Trump’s press conference on July 27, during the Democratic convention, takes on clearer significance: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” He even clarified that his message was serious at the time in response to MSNBC’s Katy Tur: “They probably have them. I’d like to have them released… I’d love to see ‘em.” (Mueller omitted this clarifying response.) Given the already established pattern of speech-as-signal or green-light to coordinated Russian response, it is reasonable—even obvious—to conclude that Trump knew precisely what this signal meant, and the signal actually had an immediate response that Mueller documented. After Trump’s press conference invitation, Russian agents “attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. They also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.”At the same time as his “Russia, if you’re listening” speech, Trump ordered his campaign to find Clinton’s mythical 30,000 deleted emails: “Michael Flynn… recalled that Trump made this request repeatedly, and Flynn subsequently contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the emails.” Given how many campaign officials had known Russian contacts, and given the recent WikiLeaks leaks, the context makes the meaning implicit: Go coordinate. (It does not matter whether direct contacts happened, because indirect contacts through intermediaries are also prohibited under campaign finance law. For example, using a common vendor can be the basis for finding illegal coordination.) * * *8. Late July: Trump orders campaign to find emails* * *Stone’s apparent contacts with Julian Assange could count as knowing coordination with a Russian agent or a known co-conspirator/intermediary with Russian agents. If Trump had directed Stone’s contact or knew of such directions around July 22, and knew of WikiLeaks’ link to hacking, the context of Trump’s order to find the emails has potential criminal significance.* * *9. Soon after July 22:* * *“Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming… In the summer of 2016, the Campaign was planning a communications strategy based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks.” No matter how Trump knew, this “communication strategy” in the context of earlier events shows an intent to coordinate with Russian hacking. The report buried this detail in Volume II on obstruction, and strangely did not place it properly as a key fact of Trump-Russian coordination. Trump’s public promotion of WikiLeaks’ releases in this context becomes key evidence of coordination.* * *10. Aug. 2 and thereafter:* * *Manafort shares with Kilimnik detailed internal polling data, focusing on battleground states Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota. Manafort continued sharing such information “for some period of time” thereafter. Other Mueller prosecutorial statements indicate that this polling data was substantial, around 70 pages. Gates suspected that Kilimnik was a “spy,” and shared this suspicion with Manafort. (The report also notes the FBI assessed him to be “tied to Russian intelligence,” and that “Kilimnik was fired from his [nonprofit position] because his links to Russian intelligence were too strong.”) “Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine.” Manafort and Gates had further contacts with Kilimnik after August 2, including more contacts about the “peace plan.” This plan was Russia’s plan to lift sanctions, the quid from the Trump Tower meeting. This was more than just a wink and a nod. It was the consistent message, continuing after the election. Unfortunately, Mueller never made this context clear. In fact, this episode leads to one of the most dumbfounding passages in the report: “The Office could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose in sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign period.” Mueller entertains Manafort’s assertion that this sharing was “good for business.” Because the polling showed off Manafort’s skills with color graphics? No, because it was valuable coordination between the campaign and Manafort’s oligarch sponsors. Even if one takes the most charitable interpretation of Manafort’s denial of coordination (to “resolve [Deripaska’s] outstanding lawsuits”), Manafort is essentially confessing to conspiracy/quid pro quo. This is the Mueller Report in a microcosm: he has evidence that Manafort committed two different kinds of crimes, yet he bends over backward to a known liar to conclude that instead of both crimes, it was neither. After this meeting, the report documents Russia agents targeting Pennsylvania miners with a rally planned for October.  But the report failed to mention that Russians also targeted Michigan and Wisconsin in their social media campaign, as was widely reported in 2017. Even if there is no evidence that these ads had a significant effect on the voting, and even if Russian agents had other sources to suggest these states were key battlegrounds, the Russian effort is consistent with a broader pattern of coordination.Mueller should have concluded that both Manafort and Gates engaged in felony campaign coordination, and he should have indicted Manafort for it. Manafort is a lawyer with decades of experience working for presidential campaigns: it would be less difficult to establish “knowing and willful” violations. And Manafort’s extraordinary record of lying to prosecutors—and coordinating his lies with Trump’s lawyers—would help prove the case as an inference of consciousness of guilt. In the very least, Mueller should have explicitly stated that there was substantial evidence of illegal coordination, even if it was insufficient for a criminal prosecution.Members of Congress should lay out this timeline clearly on July 17, and ask tough questions of Mueller: Why did you ignore the law of campaign coordination, which was clearly established by Congress and the FEC, and thoroughly upheld in broad terms by the Supreme Court? Did your failure to identify the correct legal standard limit your investigation of Manafort, Gates, Stone, and Trump? If you knew of these rules, why did you fail to identify this coordination as illegal once you found it?Mueller’s failures and omissions have another round of dangerous cause-and-effect. He is opening the loophole that Congress was purposely trying to avoid, and he is telling all the 2020 campaigns that these rules will not be enforced. Now Trump and his aides seem to think they have legal permission to openly do all of it again. Rudy Giuliani flagrantly tested these coordination rules in his political contacts with Ukraine officials. Given Mueller’s failure and Trump’s exploitation of that failure, it is now Congress’s duty to the public, the candidates under investigation, and future candidates to identify the law clearly, and to explain that some of this behavior was a civil violation, and in fact a criminal violation. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. 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Source: https://news.yahoo.com/mueller-missed-crime-trump-campaign-083025570.html
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‘What’s the point?’ Lawmakers fess up to not fully reading the Mueller report

Time for a Mueller report reality check: Only a small segment of America’s most powerful have read it.

President Donald Trump can’t give a straight answer about the subject. More than a dozen members of Congress readily admitted to POLITICO that they too have skipped around rather than studying every one of the special counsel report’s 448 pages. And despite the report technically ranking as a best-seller, only a tiny fraction of the American public has actually cracked the cover and really dived in.

“What’s the point?” said Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who like many other lawmakers recently interviewed in the Capitol acknowledged they hadn’t completed their own comprehensive read.

The result, say lawmakers, historians and cultural critics, is a giant literacy gap in the country when it comes to the most authoritative examination into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether Trump obstructed that investigation. And closing that gap could determine whether Democrats feel they have public backing to launch impeachment proceedings against the president. That’s why numerous Democrats, activists and pro-impeachment advocates say it’s up to them to teach Americans what the Mueller report says, even if there’s already considerable public fatigue with the issue.

The education campaign runs the gamut, from celebrities staging a dramatic Broadway reading of Mueller’s most juicy findings on obstruction of justice, to House Democrats pulling Robert Mueller back from retirement next week to publicly testify, hoping that live television cameras can illuminate what the dense government report cannot.

“You can’t expect people to read lengthy documents in large numbers. They have their own lives to lead,” said House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, the powerful New York congressman who has described his decision on whether to launch impeachment proceedings as hinging in no small part on public opinion.

The challenge in getting anyone to study the Mueller report is an uphill one, especially after Trump and his GOP allies made their own early play in mid-April to cement the “no collusion, no obstruction” mantra. And getting lawmakers to read beyond the Mueller report’s executive summary, media reports or their own staffers’ notes is no simple task.

“It’s tedious,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has a copy of Mueller’s work in a large stack of things she turns to for her daily reading. She said she started right away on the report’s first volume detailing the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians while on a trip to Vietnam, and as of late June she was still plugging along. “In fairness, I haven’t picked it up in at least two weeks.”

“I’ve got a lot on my reading list,” Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said as he explained why he’s avoided one of the most highly anticipated reports in recent American history.

Republicans aren’t alone. “I’d be pretty reckless to say I have a full comprehension,” said Rep. David Price (D-N.C.). “I need to spend some more time with it.”

Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) also said he hadn’t read the whole report. “It is what it is,” he said when asked why.

“I didn’t have to read it. I lived it,” offered Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vice presidential running mate. “I intended to read cover to cover, but there was nothing in it that was a surprise to me.”

The Mueller report has of course hardly been ignored. The Washington Post’s version — published with an introduction written by its Mueller beat reporters — has held a spot on The New York Times’ best-seller list for 10 consecutive weeks. More than 357,000 copies of the report released by three publishers had been sold as of late June, according to NPD Bookscan.

It’s also been a subject of fascination and obsession for cable news and provided days of comedic fodder for late night hosts.

Yet a CNN poll conducted in late April found only 3 percent of respondents saying they had gotten all the way through the report. Several House Democrats interviewed in recent weeks have taken that figure and extrapolated it out to suggest an estimated 9 million people have read all of the report, which some say seems suspiciously overstated.

“I think that’s really high,” Murkowski said. “I think they’re lying to you.”

But reading all the way through Mueller’s findings — SPOILER ALERT: Mueller shows how Trump may have obstructed justice — has helped many reach their own conclusions about what should happen next.

Breaking out first from the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign pack, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) during an early May speech on the Senate floor explained how she went “cover to cover, every page” within about 24 hours of the report’s release, and then decided that Congress should impeach Trump.

Similar stories have come from the likes of Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a freshman Democrat from South Florida who said she decided to back impeachment proceedings after she “spent countless hours” reading the report, studying the special counsel’s evidence and listening to recent testimony from legal experts.

J.W. Verret, a George Mason University law school professor who worked on the Trump transition, had a similar conversion. He called for Congress to start impeachment proceedings after poring over the report. “I mean, I read it twice. That was my impression the first 10 pages in, and I think we have to take it seriously,” he said in a recent CNN interview.

Others said reading the Mueller report brought them to different conclusions. Rep. John Ratcliffe R-Texas), a former federal prosecutor, recalled in a late April interview on Fox News that after going through the report, his main thought was “that the one person that was always being truthful about [a potential Trump-Russia conspiracy] was Donald Trump.”

Reading the Mueller report — or not— has even become its own political cudgel among Democrats.

Briana Urbina, a Democrat running against Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) in 2020, criticized the House majority leader for declaring impeachment was “not worthwhile at this point” soon after the redacted version of the Mueller report had been published. In a Baltimore Sun letter to the editor, Urbina wrote that Hoyer had “jumped the gun with a public statement denouncing impeachment without even having read the Mueller report, within hours after it was released.” A Hoyer spokesperson responded that the congressman has read “significant portions” of the report and had discussed the special counsel’s findings with other members and staff.

MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough, meantime, unloaded on Mueller last month for acting like he was “above coming to Capitol Hill and testifying for Americans” and instead directing Americans to read the report.

“It’s outrageous,” Scarborough vented.

Trump has hardly been consistent with his own answer about whether he’s read the report. “Yes, I did, and you should read it too,” the president replied when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked last month. But he was less categorical a few days later: “Let me tell you, I read much of it. I read the conclusion,” he told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

The Mueller report has its share of promoters. House Democrats dedicated more than 13 hours to a public reading in mid-May. PBS packed the report’s key findings into a 30-minute special. A small theater troupe in Bangor, Maine, tried last month reading it aloud to an audience that a local columnist reported “never grew beyond a handful.”

Journalists are making pleas to the public. “At nearly 450 pages, it’s a bit of a lift. But it’s a fast read,” Tribune News Service columnist John Crisp wrote in late April. “Read it yourself,” Scott McGrew, an NBC anchor in San Francisco, said during an on-air segment that ran the night after the report’s release.

Celebrities have gotten in on the act, too. Tom Steyer’s pro-impeachment group cut a two-minute video of actors pretending they were auditioning for a Mueller movie by reading lines from the report. Another video directed by Rob Reiner promoting the report closes with Martin Sheen imploring viewers, “Please just read it for yourself.” And the reading on Broadway last month staged the report’s obstruction section in 10 acts, divvying out parts to well-known actors like John Lithgow as Trump, Kevin Kline as Mueller and Jason Alexander as Chris Christie.

More attempts to keep the Mueller report alive are coming. There’s an 11-hour reading of the obstruction section scheduled to start at noon on Thursday in Washington, D.C. A graphic novel version of the report is coming in April 2020. The Mueller Book Club, a group that includes Public Citizen, Common Cause and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, are pushing for more public readings across the country.

These attempts to turn the report into something beyond a staid government document can help with public understanding. “It’s an easier way to make the medicine go down,” said Kurt Andersen, host of Public Radio International’s Studio 360.

Don Ritchie, the retired Senate historian, likened recent attempts to dramatize the report to a humorous parlor game associated with one of the key moments from Watergate. “I recall it was popular at parties in the ’70s to read the Nixon tape volume aloud and guess the ‘expletives deleted,’” he said. “A dedicated minority will read every word and the rest will rely on news headlines at best.”

Mueller’s report will have a chance to come to life next Wednesday when the former special counsel treks to Capitol Hill for a day of public testimony. Some key Republicans and Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have even said they are rereading the report ahead of the occasion.

Even though Mueller has vowed to stick to the confines of the report during his hearings, many argue that his appearance will educate millions of people who never plan to crack open the report.

Steve Benen, a producer on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” argued in a recent blog post that “millions” of Americans can still learn about the Mueller report’s findings even if the former special counsel sticks to a tight script during his testimony.

“Much of the country would benefit, even if he did nothing more than read from the darned thing,” Benen wrote. He recounted how one pro-Trump voter told a network reporter that she learned of the Mueller report’s damaging information only after attending a town hall event in Michigan for Rep. Justin Amash, the only non-Democrat to back impeachment.

Because of the way most people learn about complex subjects, the emphasis on actually reading the report may be a bit misplaced from a political perspective, said Elaine Kamarck, a longtime Democratic operative who worked in the Clinton White House and Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.

“Frankly, the damage has been done,” said Kamarck, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think it’s a waste. I do think it’s good to put this together in a coherent narrative. That is useful. But will it move the needle on Republican voters? I don’t think so.”

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are split on whether it’s worth it to keep on reading.

“I haven’t thought about it, to be honest with you,” said Sen. Scott, who explained he’d read “lots” of the report on his electronic device when it came out.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said he didn’t read the report and had no plans to start now. “We’ve been a little bit busy,” he said.

Murkowski said she’s still working on it because of a personal vow to hold back in weighing in until she was done.

“I think most will read like the Reader’s Digest condensed version,” she said. “Um, I do think it’s important to read it, and that’s why I’m poring through it. I just don’t have 18 hours that I can just sit down and give it a read. So, I get 15 minutes here and 25 minutes there. But I do think it’s important to read and that’s why I’m going to commit to it.”

Several lawmakers said they didn’t need to read all of Mueller’s findings because their own work on Capitol Hill had also involved investigating the 2016 election.

“I would tell you, have I read every single page? No. Have I gone though it? Yes. Some sections more so than others,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who noted as a member of the Intelligence Committee during the last Congress, some of it was “old news” and he could “flip through quickly.”

“I could get to sections saying, ‘Know that, know that,’” he said.

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) didn’t hide from the question. “I knew there’d have to be a time that I’d be asked. So I wish I had read it before you asked. But in all honesty, I haven’t.”

He explained that he didn’t dig in because “there’s no drive and push in my district specifically for impeachment.” And he questioned why Trump could even be investigated for obstruction of justice when he wasn’t accused of an underlying crime.

About two hours later, a Shimkus spokesman emailed with a message from the congressman: “He asked me to let you know that he’s reading the Mueller Report.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/09/congress-read-mueller-report-1402232
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Schiff says Mueller has 1 more duty left

House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said special counsel Robert Mueller isn’t done serving his country and should testify before Congress about his investigation into the 2016 election.

“I was disappointed … to see such a profound reluctance to testify,” Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “I think he has one last service to perform. It’s not enough merely to speak for 10 minutes and say, ‘I’m not going to answer questions for Congress and the American people.’ There are a great many things that are not in the report.”

Mueller delivered final remarks Wednesday as he closed up shop as special counsel and said that he did not intend on testifying before Congress. Mueller characterized his report as his testimony, while emphasizing that it did not clear President Donald Trump of misdeed or criminal acts such as obstruction of justice.

“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller said at the briefing.

That has hardly satisfied House Democrats who continue to probe into a litany of the president’s affairs, from his actions during the 2016 campaign to his personal finances.

Schiff said he still wants to ask Mueller about whether Russia has collateral on Trump, keeping him in its influence, as well as a number of other topics that were not in the report. If Mueller does not willingly testify, Schiff said he would recommend issuing Mueller a subpoena.

Though pressing for more information, Schiff did not say that impeachment was an immediate priority. The representative continued to toe House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s line of focusing on the party’s legislative agenda rather than impeachment now that Democrats have a majority in the House.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a vocal Trump ally, retorted on ABC that Mueller had ample time to establish if Trump had obstructed of justice. Still, Jordan said he had questions for Mueller and did not oppose having him testify.

“Bob Mueller had 22 months, $30 million, 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents, 500 witnesses, 2,800 subpoenas. If he could have accomplished obstruction, he would have done it,” Jordan said.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/02/adam-schiff-robert-mueller-testimony-1349640
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The Article Was Written/Published By: mchoi@politico.com (Matthew Choi)

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Booker calls for impeaching Trump after Mueller’s statement

Sen. Cory Booker on Wednesday called for Congress to launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, becoming the latest 2020 White House contender to endorse the president’s removal from office.

The New Jersey Democrat had previously demanded further probes by lawmakers into Trump’s conduct and Russian interference in the 2016 election, pressing for members of Congress to receive special counsel Robert Mueller’s underlying investigatory materials and public testimony.

But Mueller’s remarks during an appearance at the Justice Department Wednesday triggered the change in Booker’s stance, he tweeted.

“Robert Mueller’s statement makes it clear: Congress has a legal and moral obligation to begin impeachment proceedings immediately,” Booker wrote.

“I’ve been asking for Mueller’s testimony—today he made his views clear,” he continued, adding: “This Administration has continued to stonewall Congress’s oversight. Beginning impeachment proceedings is the only path forward.”

Mueller said Wednesday he would prefer not to appear before Congress to discuss the findings of his investigation, and he reiterated the principal conclusions of his report — which uncovered insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin but did not absolve the president on claims that he obstructed justice.

“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller said. “We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.”

Several Democrats vying to take on Trump in 2020 interpreted Mueller’s prepared statement as essentially an impeachment referral to Congress.

“What is clear is that I think it’s a fair inference from what we heard in that press conference that Bob Mueller was essentially referring impeachment to the United States Congress,” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) told reporters while campaigning in South Carolina.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) tweeted after Mueller’s remarks that impeachment hearings “should begin tomorrow,” writing online that “Mueller did his job. Now it’s time to do ours.”

Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and secretary of Housing and Urban Development, tweeted that lawmakers “should begin an impeachment inquiry” because Mueller “made clear this morning that his investigation now lays at the feet of Congress.”

Former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke wrote online that “[t]here must be consequences, accountability, and justice” as a result of Mueller’s probe and “[t]he only way to ensure that is to begin impeachment proceedings.”

Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., told NBC News that Mueller’s remarks were “as close to an impeachment referral as you could get under the circumstances,” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — the first of the leading 2020 candidates to call for Trump’s impeachment — tweeted: “Mueller’s statement makes clear what those who have read his report know: It is an impeachment referral, and it’s up to Congress to act. They should.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/29/2020-democrats-impeachment-mueller-1346504
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The Article Was Written/Published By: qforgey@politico.com (Quint Forgey)

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Mueller just told the world Trump is a criminal. Now congress must impeach him

Despite the constraints of Department of Justice rules the special counsel’s inference in his eight-minute address is clear

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/mueller-resigns-trump-impeachment-congress-crimes-speech-statement-a8935301.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Chris Stevenson

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‘Case closed!’ Trump tweets nothing’s changed as resigned Mueller says charging him wasn’t an option

President Donald Trump has said that “nothing changes,” following Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s public statement on the ‘Russiagate’ investigation. The president declared that “the case is closed.”

Read Full Article at RT.com

Source: https://www.rt.com/usa/460560-trump-mueller-case-closed/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
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The Article Was Written/Published By: RT

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Mueller says policy protected Trump from indictment but hints at impeachment in resignation statement

Special counsel Robert Mueller has spoken publicly for the first time following the release of his office’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election, saying that his investigation could not have charged Donald Trump with obstruction because of Department of Justice policy that prohibits charging a sitting president with a crime.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/mueller-resigns-statement-trump-investigation-impeachment-press-conference-a8935151.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Clark Mindock

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Charging Trump with obstruction of justice ‘was not an option’ – Mueller in 1st public statement

US Special Counsel Robert Mueller has made his first public statement since delivering his report. He announced he is formally closing counsel’s office and resigning from Justice Department.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Source: https://www.rt.com/usa/460556-live-robert-mueller-speaks-report/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
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The Article Was Written/Published By: RT

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Mueller planned to charge Trump with obstruction and witness tampering, expose claims

Document reportedly details ‘extraordinary lengths’ president took ‘to protect himself from legal scrutiny and accountability’

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-mueller-indictments-michael-wolff-book-obstruction-of-justice-fire-and-fury-siege-a8933706.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Chris Riotta

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