This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
There was no knight on a white horse yesterday. He delivered exactly what he promised he would. Bob Mueller’s long-awaited and highly anticipated testimony didn’t provide any information that he hadn’t already provided in his written report.
Both sides were hoping for more. And each was disappointed.
Democrats had hoped there might be a smoking gun; or at a minimum, some sensational new revelation that would revive and perhaps stoke the interest of an American public that seems ready to move on from the Mueller Report and potential impeachment proceedings.
Republicans had hoped that they could embarrass or discredit a man who had spent his career in service to this country — beginning as a young man fighting in wars that many of them dodged or avoided.
Mueller told us before it all started he wouldn’t go beyond the Report; I think it is fair to say now that his was the understatement of the year. He’s a prosecutor’s prosecutor, and this was a political fight — one he repeatedly refused to join. Many of us were hoping to see the Marine that Bob Mueller had once been. A soldier who was prepared to go toe-to-toe with the apologists for Donald Trump. We were hoping to see someone defending the report with gusto. But Bob Mueller wouldn’t even read from the report itself, instead requiring members of Congress to do so for him, so that there would be no sound bites that could be taken out of context or used in political ads. On almost all issues he either deferred to the written report or absorbed body blows from Republicans, responding that he “took their question.”
The basic information did come out. But it was information we all knew from the written report months ago. Some nuggets were highlighted:
- the President’s “no obstruction, no collusion” line was obliterated;
- Mueller made even more clear that didn’t make a finding about the President’s guilt because of the OLC opinion;
- the President refused to be interviewed and was uncooperative;
- the campaign welcomed Russian help;
- lies by Trump officials hurt the investigation;
- the elements of obstruction of justice have been satisfied.
The obvious question is, now what? If the hearing this week is prologue, I’m afraid I have some bad news: Trump is going to get away with it.
House Democrats had weeks to organize this hearing and figure out a way to tell the arc of this basic story. It’s the kind of story prosecutors tell every day, and it would go something like this: in the first chapter, the Russians attacked our democracy. Next comes the recruitment of Trump loyalists. Then the repeated contacts with the campaign and family. And finally, the Cover-Up, the lies and the outright obstruction of justice.
But that’s not the story they told. Instead, the first hearing addressed obstruction, and the second one was about the cyber crime and collusion.
Anyone who’s ever spent time in a courtroom knows you can’t tell a story by starting with its ending. You don’t open your case with the cover-up of a crime — you have to start with the crime itself.
House Democrats have spent the last two years waiting for someone else to solve the Trump conundrum. Flynn is going to flip! Stone knows everything and he will flip! Corsi knows a lot more than he is saying … the pressure on him is immense to flip! Papadopolous’ mother is pressuring him to come clean! Manafort is coming, Manafort is coming! Pay attention to Gates! Assange has no choice! Mueller will indict the President (even though it was always clear the DOJ memo did not allow it). And now, if they could just get Don McGahn…
What became clear Wednesday is that there is no savior here, no knight in shining armor is going to ride in and save the day. It is now up to them, and to them alone, to determine whether they follow the polls or whether they follow the evidence. House Democrats are uniquely given the power to remove a President. No one else can do this job for them. And if Wednesday’s hearings proved anything, no witness, not even a living legend like Bob Mueller, can make the political difficulties of the case go away.
The legal case is obvious: the President welcomed Russian assistance in the 2016 election. Neither he nor anyone in his campaign told the FBI or any law enforcement authority about the Russian offers to assist his campaign. He then obstructed the investigation and lied to cover it all up.
The facts and witnesses are well known at this point. If President Trump were anyone else, he would be indicted, as over 1,000 former prosecutors stated in a recent letter. But today, this is no longer a legal case, it is a political one.
Speaker Pelosi must make the decision about whether or not she wants to spend political capital to begin an impeachment proceeding, knowing it will ultimately fail in the Senate. And eventually, the full House may have to decide whether to impeach or not. Nothing that happened on Wednesday is going to change that, and no witness, no matter who, is going to ride in on a white horse and save them from the most difficult political decision that any of them will ever have to make.
Bob Mueller did what he said he would do. Now it’s up to Nancy Pelosi to decide what to do next.
Cynthia Alksne is a career federal prosecutor, MSNBC Legal Analyst, and expert on criminal law, grand jury and police investigations and confrontational interviewing techniques. She has tried more than fifty cases to verdict and analyzed thousands more — as a prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, as an Assistant US Attorney in the United States Attorney’s Office in Washington where she worked for former Attorney General Eric Holder and alongside former FBI Director Robert Mueller, as Assistant District Attorney in the Brooklyn, NY District Attorney’s Office, and as Assistant Attorney General for the State of Texas. She has investigated and secured or negotiated guilty pleas and/or plea agreements in hundreds of criminal cases.
I can see why this article was written this way, although I disagree with the implied assertion that Mueller did not move the needle.
Sometimes I get impatient with these sports-analogy dramatic depictions of solvable problems.
Mature adults do not need “thanks I needed that” depictions all the time. Ground WAS covered in the Mueller hearings, and those who we trust our nation to (and I am talking about the Dem House Brain Trust) had better get cracking.
But we should have known THAT before this hit piece.
This is becoming a massive distraction. Every day spent discussing the issues of Russian interference, co-option of the Trump campaign, is a news cycle not devoted to the core pocketbook issues that will move the electorate next November.
I grew up in the house of a small-town Democratic party operative in a Republican county north of New York City. My father taught me that of primary importance is getting elected;. Our focus has to be on issues – health care, education, economic growth – that affect the lives of real people.
Also tired of hearing about how the story had to be told differently, yada yada. Look if you were someone who didn’t know about the Mueller report it doesn’t matter if they reversed the hearings or not, the issue is that people who don’t understand whats in it are not the ones who watched hours of congressional hearings.
The point of the hearing was to get Mueller to say that what drump/Barr has been saying about the report is lies, and that is what happened. Would of been better if Mueller was willing to do more, but he wasn’t.
Okay, Trump is a disgusting, mendacious, incompetent fraud…we can all agree on that. But, he’s a symptom, not a cause. I blame the limp, inept, cowardly Democrats for ever allowing this shit stain to get elected in the first place. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the HRC campaign are as much to blame for Trump’s presidency. We liberals must stop blaming Russia for Trump’s election. Russia is a convenient distraction so the Democrats don’t have to own up to their profound campaign incompetence and their total lack of messaging skills. And, keep in mind that Israel meddles/manipulates our elections FAR more than Russia ever has. Then, there’s the whole thing about the USA meddling in elections all over the globe, and engaging in illegal regime change whenever it seems expedient. I’m so god damn sick and tired of the Democrats blaming Russia for Trump’s election. If the Dems knew how to fight, how to WIN, then we’d have a majority in the House, in the Senate and there’d be a Dem POTUS.
What I don’t understand is why anyone thought that Mueller was going to play the hero and bring Trump down. If that were the case, and who the man wanted to be, we would have had signs of it long ago, and we didn’t. All we ever got from him were signs that he is the consummate public servant and bureaucrat.
Sometimes the ability to mistake real life for a movie, even among those who really should know better, astounds me.