4.18.2019 / THE [REDACTED] REPORT
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SCORING - NORTH SOUTH
NEWS MONTAGE:
The Justice Department has just appointed a special counsel to lead a new investigation into Russian influence in the election. The Department naming former FBI chief Robert Mueller as special counselor.
Paul Manafort former Trump campaign chairman is now a criminal defendant.
National Security Advisor. Michael Flynn says that he is cooperating with the special counsel's probe.
Thirteen Russians and three Russian companies interfered online and in-person in the 2016 election.
SCORING BUMP
Michael Cohen’s offices were raided by the FBI for reasons unknown at this time.
The jury found Paul Manafort guilty of intentionally dodging taxes on millions of dollars.
Jeff Sessions is now out as attorney general.
President Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his contacts with Russians.
[Police shouting] Open the door!
The Department of Justice will also make the report available to the American people after it has been delivered to Congress.
SCORING OUT
SEAN RAMESWARAM (Host): Andrew Prokop. Mueller reporter at Vox. It's finally here in redacted form. What does it say?
ANDREW PROKOP (Reporter): So the Mueller Report is divided into two main parts. The first is about Russian interference in the election and the second is about whether President Trump obstructed justice.
SEAN: And this is where we were the last time we talked. That time we just had a four-page summary. This time we have a 400-odd page report. So what does it say specifically starting with the Russia investigation, collusion?
ANDREW: Mueller makes it very clear that there was a Russian effort to interfere with the election. It relates to the two main areas where he has already filed charges against various Russian nationals. The first of these areas is the social media propaganda effort. And the other area is the hacking and leaking of Democrats’ emails. So Mueller starts off by saying yes Russia did interfere in these two main ways. However Mueller did not establish any conspiracy between Trump associates and the Russian government on either of these two fronts, the social media propaganda or the hacking of the emails.
SEAN: What does the report say about the link between Trump associates and the Russian government specifically?
ANDREW: Mueller writes, “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” So basically Russia wanted Trump to be president and tried to make it happen. The Trump campaign was happy to get Russian help but the two never really met. There was no deal cut or at least not enough evidence to establish such a deal being cut between Russia and the Trump campaign.
SEAN: One thing I don't really get is the report says that when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Trump that Mueller had been appointed on May 17th, 2017, Trump reportedly responded quote “Oh my God this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked.”
ANDREW: Yes.
SEAN: End quote. Why would you say that unless you did something very very bad.
ANDREW: Mueller writes at one point, “The evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the president personally that the president could have understood to be crimes, or that would give rise to personal and political concerns.” Basically Mueller thinks that even if there was no conspiracy between Trump and Russia he had ample other reasons to really want to try and stop this investigation in its tracks.
SEAN: And I guess that's where the obstruction comes in. What do we learn from this report about how much the president himself may have tried to obstruct the investigation, obstruct justice?
ANDREW: The second half of the report describes 10 different episodes in which Trump while president may have attempted to obstruct justice by interfering with the Russia investigation essentially. These include things like his firing of James Comey his efforts to stop Comey from investigating Michael Flynn.
SEAN: Right.
ANDREW: And also various other things that we've heard less about for for instance an effort to push out Mueller himself, an effort to get his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to try to tell Jeff Sessions to rein in Mueller's investigation. So Mueller goes over what the facts show on all of these topics.
SEAN: Yeah.
ANDREW: But he does not make up his mind one way or the other whether this amounted to criminal conduct and he says that one of the big reasons why he decided not to make that call is that Trump is the president and the Justice Department has held that you can't prosecute a sitting president. So the gist of a lot of this is that Mueller is trying to lay out the facts of what happened here without going so far as to say this was criminal obstruction of justice or this wasn't criminal obstruction of justice.
SEAN: And what does he say about what the president directed others to do to maybe slow this investigation down or make it go away?
ANDREW: There's a good quote here where Mueller writes that “The president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” In other words Trump kept telling his subordinates to interfere with investigations or to fire people or to shut down various lines of inquiry. And those people around Trump kept not doing it. This is why he's not charging any of Trump's aides with obstruction of justice because essentially they just didn't do what Trump told them to do.
SEAN: It’s a little confusing right? He's saying Trump wanted people around him to commit obstruction of justice, and he’s done a bunch of things that seem very obstruction-y, but he’s still not saying this is definitely obstruction?
ANDREW: It is confusing. And there have been questions about why Mueller chose this approach exactly. Mueller makes it clear again and again that he is definitively not exonerating Trump. Mueller writes “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice we would so state based on the facts and the applicable legal standards we are unable to reach that judgment.
SEAN: Hmm.
ANDREW: Accordingly while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Congress which has the responsibility for potentially impeaching a president. And of course the American public can kind of make up their minds for themselves.
SEAN: How much of the report was redacted? And do we know why what was redacted was redacted?
ANDREW: So there are some significant redactions. Each redaction is identified with a justification. There are four main categories of that. First is grand jury material. Second is material that relates to ongoing investigations. Third is material that could compromise intelligence sources and methods. And fourth is material that could compromise the privacy interests of peripheral third parties. So there are you know black bars. Some whole pages are blacked out. Sometimes it's just certain words or phrases. And some of these do appear to be important. Roger Stone is facing a trial that in part relates to what he has said about his efforts to get in touch with WikiLeaks regarding the stolen Democratic e-mails that were hacked by Russia. Because of this pending trial the government is under an obligation not to disclose material that could prejudice the outcome in that trial. So a lot of the stuff about Roger Stone in here is completely blacked out. That includes whether any Trump people worked with WikiLeaks or had come into contact with the hacked e-mails before they became public. That really isn't resolved here a lot of that is blacked out.
SEAN: Democrats want Mueller to come testify. Might we learn more from that or other hearings that might follow?
ANDREW: The Justice Department is going to provide a version of the report with fewer redactions to Congress in private and let them look at it. So we may learn through leaks about more stuff that's redacted in the public version. Mueller did not appear at Barr’s press conference about the report today and there is no sign that he has any plans to speak about this anytime soon. Democrats on the Hill certainly want him to testify but it's unclear whether that will happen.
SEAN: You've been reporting on this for for two years and today you finally got to touch the thing, read the thing. What did you make of what you saw?
ANDREW: All of this obstruction stuff looks pretty bad. Trump pretty clearly attempted to interfere with this investigation again and again and again and it didn't in the end work so far as we know the investigation continued and it did reach a conclusion, but it does tell us something that the president of the United States is is someone who's willing to keep trying to use his power in this way to try to impede an investigation into people around him and eventually himself.
SCORING - EDGE TO EDGE
CLIP <TRUMP>: This should never happen to another president again. This hoax
should never happen to another president again. Thank you.
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SEAN: I ask Ezra Klein what all of this means for the presidency and the country after the break.
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SEAN: Ezra Klein, before we had a chance to even read this report today William Barr told us what to think about it. Why did he do that?
EZRA KLEIN: I think are three ways to read that press conference. One of them is that the audience is Donald Trump himself; Donald Trump, as you will read if you read this report, is very into his subordinates spinning for him and defending him and protecting him. So William Barr goes out before anybody else has publicly seen the report although not by the way before the Trump administration to seen the report. And he goes out and gives an extremely “protective of Trump” summary.
CLIP <AG BILL BARR>: President Trump faced an unprecedented situation. As he entered into office, and sought to perform his responsibilities as President, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates.
EZRA: But the other thing and this is a kind of classic way of exploiting a weakness in the press is that what Barr was trying to do was he was creating visual clips that the news would run all day. There was an hour or so between his press conference and when the report actually came out. So during that period all that was really being run was clips of him talking and then people talking about him and then of course those clips will be run on the nightly news, too. I think that his spin on the report was so friendly to Trump and then the report was so much more mixed than that shall we say that it might ultimately backfire.
SEAN: Yeah, how does what Barr said in his summary weeks ago and this morning line up with what we read in the actual report?
EZRA: I almost want to pull out of all the summaries and all the talking like what if you just woke up like Rip Van Winkle and just read this report.
SEAN: <laughs>
EZRA: And I would submit is that it is incredibly damning. It is actually shocking to read it all… all stacked up one after the other after the other after the other. I would say that the big picture story that is being told here - and then you can decide how you feel about that story - has a couple parts. One, and this is literally the second sentence of the report, is that Russia had a sweeping and massive operation to influence a 2016 election in Donald Trump's favor.
SEAN: Right.
EZRA: The Trump campaign believed that would benefit them. They also by the way during this period the Trump organization was in talks to open up a Trump Moscow.This went on for much longer than Donald Trump admitted; it went on well into 2016. And during this period there was some advance warning for Trump associates of the WikiLeaks hacks. The hack telekinetic emails so was all that. Then there is this obstruction piece. And the obstruction is much more damning than I thought. I am somebody who came into this thinking Donald Trump had obstructed justice just given what we had seen: he had fired James Comey, I mean there was a lot in the public record there. But when you read that part of Mueller's report, what he is saying, I would argue this is a fair summary, is that they believe Donald Trump is obstructed justice and they do not believe it is proper for them to make that judgment. They say again and again that if they thought he had not they would say that they say that they are not making a traditional prosecutorial judgment, but they think it is fair for Congress to make judgments about whether or not the president has overstepped his boundaries here and they offer ten different instances where they say there is a plausible case that one might want to investigate about whether or not obstruction was done and they offer a lot of evidence about what happened.
SEAN: Well if the most if the most damning thing in this report is the obstruction of justice that that Mueller saw from Trump and his subordinates, does it matter if William Barr has already cleared the President on obstruction of justice?
EZRA: I mean “matter” is a hard word here. So what matters whatever. What. What was ever going to matter here. There was never a chance not a real one. The Republicans in the Senate were going to vote to impeach Donald Trump.
SEAN: Right.
EZRA: So the idea that this is going to lead to impeachment I've said this for a long time has been fanciful. So what does matter mean, it matters that we know this. It matters that we have a better record the investigations are going to come from this right. House Democrats are going to launch many investigations coming out of this report will matter at least again in terms of getting us more information.But then there are two questions in terms of whether it matters in terms of political consequences. One is whether or not anything in the report or any investigation stemming from the report lead to some kind of congressional action against Donald Trump, right? Impeachment is fundamentally a political decision. It is a political consequence.
SEAN: Right.
EZRA: And then there's a question of the election and does it matter in the way people assess Trump. And you know I'll be honest I'm inclined to think that neither one of those are going to be a way in which this matters. I think people's minds on this are very made up. We did not see much change in polling around this after Barr's initial summary and I don't think we're going to see a huge change after this. And similarly while I think Democrats will investigate a lot by the time those investigations are really bearing fruit, I think we’re going to be so deep into 2020 they're not going to want to launch those kinds of proceedings.
And one last point on this, another way it should matter. There's a lot of information here on Russia trying to hack among other things election systems.
SEAN: Yeah.
EZRA: They appear to have in fact taken over the computers at least one Florida county. Now I'm not saying they change the results of the election in that way. I don't see evidence of that but among other things we could do a lot to harden security both for political actors and for our actual election systems against not just Russia but other foreign incursions. And that is another thing here that worries me.
SEAN: Talking about our next election that isn't that far away, I wonder, you know, hearing William Barr this morning stressing the point to say that this is unprecedented. What exactly is the precedent that we now have that special counsel Robert Mueller lists out ten instances of obstruction and nothing might come of it? What does that mean for the expansion of executive power and executive privilege? Because it feels like what this amounts to is saying here's what the president can get away with!
EZRA: When I look at the history of the past couple of years and the Mueller investigation is part but not all of this argument. What I see is a political system in which it is clear that our methods of accountability are broken. The true methods of accountability, the true mechanisms of accountability, we have are functionally partisan. I don't think anybody believes the Republican Congress would have treated something similar the same way if it had been about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. They will work or arguably will work although they can also be overused if the Congress particularly is controlled by the opposition party and they will fail if it is controlled by the president's party.
SEAN: But Trump is the leader of his party. And he’s out there TODAY, after he’s received the report, saying what an injustice this investigation was. As if all these people weren’t indicted and charged. As if Mueller didn’t produce ten examples of potential obstruction.
EZRA: One of the things that has been striking to me about the administration's spin on this is that even if you take the very generous view of the president's motivations, it's quite damning. So what William Barr said this morning, and what the report says in different ways throughout it, is that Donald Trump was just so angry, he was so mad that this investigation was going on and it might cast doubt on the legitimacy of his election, or it might distract other parts of his presidency. That he began to engage in all these other behaviors and the implication of that from Barr and others is it's all understandable that yeah maybe he did kind of obstruct justice and lie a lot and try to fire people who are looking into what Russia had done and whether or not there have been connections to the Trump campaign when they were doing it. But it's understandable because he was really upset. And this idea that Donald Trump took a foreign government’s attack on America's political system turned it in his own head to a transactional benefit for him and then took any effort to figure out what had gone wrong and what had happened as an attack on him that he had to defend against. That's quite damning. I mean, when you're president of the United States you're not just you. You're not just like a competitor on some political reality show. You're the president, you represent this country even the parts of it they didn't vote for you. And Donald Trump's consistent inability to conceive of himself in that larger role is one of the true ways in which he has been too small and too narrow for this job.
SCORING <INTERGALACTIC RADIO >
SEAN: Ezra Klein hosts The Ezra Klein Show from Vox.
I’m Sean Rameswaram. This is Today, Explained.