President Donald Trump said Monday in the Oval Office with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it “wouldn’t bother me at all” if the Mueller report was released, but added that it’s “up to the attorney general.”
Trump says it wouldn’t bother him if the Mueller report is released pic.twitter.com/bx1osIPLW6
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) March 25, 2019
Trump has reportedly been in a buoyant mood since Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller report came out. Earlier on Monday, he told reporters that he thought that the special counsel did an honorable job with the investigation, a far cry from the many “witch hunt” tweets of yore.
While neither Trump nor anyone in his administration has yet received Mueller’s full report, they are insisting that the President has been fully exonerated from it. In fact, in the few quotes that we have from the report via Barr, Mueller writes explicitly that though there is not enough evidence for conviction, the President is not exonerated of obstruction of justice.
I’d definitely be chomping at the bit to get the feds to release a detailed investigation into me that explicitly says it does not exonerate me. I can’t see how that could backfire.
Poor guy plays tic-tac-toe on a 1x1 board.
“Wouldn’t bother me at all…”
(Aside to secretary – get me Barr on the damned phone so I can tell him to ***not release the damned report no matter what!!!***)
So in public “It wouldn’t bother me at all.” In private to Barr, “Never let it out.”
I said this when he first started saying he’d be fine with having the report released. Standard Trump smoke and mirrors. “I’d be happy to testify in person, but it’s up to my lawyers” followed by “Oopsy I guess they didn’t want me to testify. I wanted to!”.
Same with releasing his taxes, same with everything else.
One potential slight backfire this time is now Congressional Democrats are quoting him, saying hey Trump has no objection to us seeing the whole report.
Of course he says this…he hasn’t seen it (or, more to the point, been told by someone what’s in it in dumbed-down terms he can understand) and it’s BARR’s job to obstruct it coming out, not his. It’s why he hired Barr and Barr is doing what he was hired to do to a T. His tone about it will shift greatly once he understands (to the extent he’s capable) what’s in it.
Don’t get your hopes up on seeing the thing. Seriously.