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ROBERT MUELLER I know. And we included it in the report for exactly that reason. He may not know it and he should know it.
CONGRESSMAN MIKE TURNER (R-OH) I think you put that in there for exactly what I'm going to discuss next and that is So The Washington Post yesterday, when speaking of your report, the article said, "Trump could not be exonerated of trying to obstruct the investigation itself." Now, this is my concern, Mr. Mueller. This is the headline on all of the news channels while you were testifying today, "Mueller: Trump was not exonerated." Now Mr. Mueller, what you know is that this can't say "Mueller Exonerated Trump" because you don't have the power or authority to exonerate Trump. You had no more power to declare him exonerated than you have the power to declare him Anderson Cooper. The statement about exoneration is misleading, and it's meaningless, and it colors this investigation. One word out of the entire portion of your report, and it's a meaningless word that has no legal meaning.
MARC STEINER So. And if you look at that earlier, earlier the Democrats were pushing the collusion issue and Mueller was actually saying that heYou know, Trump tweeted that Mueller was trying to get the FBI job. Mueller said he wasn't. And then they were going through all these other machinations about how they were trying to stop him from doing the investigation, which you could conclude was, kind of, trying to stop him from doing his investigation. So where do you think this leaves the American people in terms of what they heard?
COLEEN ROWLEY Confused, I suppose. And I think the partisan sides will continue to believe what they want to believe. The big question is whether the Democrat leadership will push impeachment and that's the real big question. The time has almost run out for that anyways and there did not seem to be much of a, you know, much of a majority. There certainly was not a majority opinion that they wanted to push this. So that's the big thing. I think people who are watching this are going to be confused, a little bit confused. I will tell you on the sense of exoneration, that as the Freedom of Information person for years in our FBI, there were some really sad cases. Because in many cases, the person does not know that they're under investigation by the FBI.
And as long as the public not doesn't know, and if you don't find enough evidence to charge someone no harm, no foul. It's all, you know, not known and the person's reputation doesn't suffer. But there were some cases where it became known that the FBI was investigating. And yes, people would say now, you know what? You didn't charge me; I'm exonerated. The only way that they could really do this was to file a Freedom of Information and then try to get the actual documents. And then argue that look, I was innocent all along. But the FBI would never come out. And the only times they would do this, going back to the wrong anthrax subject that Mueller and Comey both had wrong, who was Steven Hatfill. The only time you could really maybe prove exoneration would be filing a civil lawsuit against the FBI for being innocently targeted. And there were from time to time some of those.
MARC STEINER Right.
COLEEN ROWLEY But you know what? The policy, absolutely no power to exonerate. The Republican was completely correct. Barr would not have that power and certainly Mueller, so then why does he write this? And his answer was less than honest I think.
MARC STEINER Well, that'sI wish we had time to really explore "less than honest" [laughs] in some real detail. But I want to throw this tweet up by Trump before we run on time and try to get to a couple more issues depending on how much time we have left. But this particular Trump tweet where he says, "So Democrats and others can illegally fabricate a crime, try pinning it on a very innocent President, and when he fights back against this illegal and treasonous attack on our Country, they call It Obstruction? Wrong! Why didn't Robert Mueller investigate the investigators?" So he pushes this lineI mean, this is from a man who wasn't watching it, but I guess he was watching it. So I mean, you know, that's why when I watch this whole thing, and watch the commentary on some of the Democratic on more progressive media, and then watching it on Fox, and looking at which C-SPAN was saying, I go back to what I was saying earlier, which is that this is really hard for people to parse through this. And people can ask their question, what are we watching? Where does this take us impeachment? Did we learn anything? You know, that seems to me to be the problem with this.
COLEEN ROWLEY You know, obstructionThe Republicans went through the three elements for obstruction and they actually have some, they have some arguments that it doesn't even begin to meet the criteria for obstruction. There's three or four different statutes, but none of them fit exactly. You know, Mueller, like many attorneys, uses creative legal theories to bend these statutes. But besides that, the common person would normally have a notion that you can't obstruct a crime unless most people would think unless you committed the crime. So if you committed the crime, and then you lie about it or you intimidate the, you knowI worked organized crime in New York City, and so John Gotti absolutely would tamper with witnesses and everything else, but he committed the crimes.
And so, there's another part of this like the Martha Stewart case or the Nixon case where you could be obstructing an investigation, but it's to protect a family member or a friend or a close associate. Now in this case, it's actually another whole level because Mueller doesn't find that a crime has even occurred. That's the problem here. The initial crime of colluding with the Russians, he found no Americans even committed that crime. And so when you find that there's no crime at all, it's really hard to imagine how you can obstruct. I know they threw a slide up that said, "to prevent personal embarrassment." But that, if it's merely to prevent embarrassment from having been charged, or publicly castigated for having committed a crime, and now you're fighting back on this, but you're innocent
You know, let's take the example of this poor guy that was accused of being the anthrax killer and he fights back on it. Now, you can say he's obstructing the investigation. There is no prosecutor who would ever prosecute a case like this. It is so, you know, again it's such a far-fetched example. And I can tell you from personal experience, even when you had parents or family members that were obstructing an investigation by hiding a fugitive like their own kid or something like that, those would be very rarely prosecuted because they were just not good cases.
MARC STEINER So one of the things, as we conclude here, Russian interference was a big part of why this became a case in the first place, why people started talking about this. Let's take a quick look at this one piece here with Adam Schiff and Mueller talking about Russian interference. And then very quickly in the limited time we have, your response to what this showed us or didn't show us.
CONGRESSMAN ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA) The campaign welcomed the Russian help, did they not?
ROBERT MUELLER I think we report, in the report, indications that that occurred. Yes.
CONGRESSMAN ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA) Apart from the Russians wanting to help Trump win, several individuals associated with the Trump campaign were also trying to make money during the campaign and transition, is that correct?
ROBERT MUELLER That is true.
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