Mueller Testimony Fails to Energize Trump Probes

was guilty of obstruction of justice. At one point, Congressman Hachem Jeffreys of New York went through the elements of obstruction of justice and showed the points in the report that met those elements. And then when he ended, though, Robert Mueller decided to sort of way lay him and dispute a little bit about what he said. No one is above the law. No one the president must be held accountable one way or the other. Let me let me just say, if I might, I don't subscribe necessarily

to your um the way you analyze that. I'm not saying it's out of the ballpark, but I'm not supportive of that analytical charge. And those were the kind of responses that we heard from Robert Mueller. Not supportive of the charge. I don't necessarily agree with what you said.

I refer you to the report generally accurate, very little disagreeing, except when it was discussed that the allegation by Republicans that the members of his team were politically biased joining us Now is Robert Mints, a partner at McCarter and English and a former federal prosecutor, Bob Anyone listening to this and hearing it in a vacuum, not knowing what had gone on. What do you suppose they would make

of his three hours of testimony? Well, that's a great question, because it's almost as if there were two different movies being watched here. It's been referred to at the report was was long, was four hund or forty eight pages, and nobody read it, and this is gonna be the movie version that was going to be a riveting experience for millions of Americans. I don't think they got that. He really had lots of long winded speeches from both sides,

cross examination, leading questions. Nobody was able to draw Mueller out into giving any kind of a narrative. He never added any color, any background, He provided no further insights into how he reached any of his conclusions, and at the end of the day. It was difficult for Democrats to even got the single sound bite they were hoping to get. I think maybe the best they got was when Mueller said the president was not exculpated for the

acts he allegedly committed. Uh. And and even that is uh, is not the greatest sound bite after what is it now? What three hours of testimony? One thing we did learn is that from the very outset, Muller and his team agreed to the Office of Legal Counsel's opinion that a president cannot be indicted. So everything they did after that was based on that. Could that color the way they

viewed the evidence? Yet to me, that is the biggest puzzle about all of this that's never really been clearly answered, And I was hoping that Mueller might shed some light on that, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. Because when Bill Barr, the a G testified to Congress, he told Congress he asked Muller to reach a conclusion on all crimes. And yet as to obstruction of justice,

we know that Mueller didn't didn't do that. It was really a situation where Mueller looked at the d J guidelines and decided that he could conclude that there was no evidence, as he did on the collusion or uh conspiracy part of it, that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. But on the other on the flip side of the coin, whether or not there there might be sufficient evidence to charge obstruction. He said that the

DJ guidelines prohibited prohibited him from reaching that conclusion. And then there's a second d J guideline that also says that you can't add talk about an unindicted co conspirator. So not only could he not reach a conclusion about whether a crime was committed, but he also couldn't even explain the underlying facts that might have ultimately influenced somebody down the road to decide whether a crime was committed. So from the very beginning, this was sort of a

doomed investigation. To me, that is the biggest puzzle as to why Mueller approached it this way, Why he viewed his mandate as allowing him to decide that no crime has been committed, but at the same time he was prohibited from this from making the opposite conclusion. I gotta ask about some of the GOP strategy which was to really come at Mueller hard to undermine the integrity of the testimony, are really the report itself? Was that a

smart move on the Republicans part? Did it or did it make them look like they were kind of ganging up on a man who has served his country both in uniform and and in civil service. Well, I guess we'll have to see how it plays out. I mean, one thing Mueller did, I thought effectively, and I'm sure this was by design. He was not going to be

drawn into the political fray here by either side. The Democrats had the advantage of being able to ask these long leading questions where they quoted directly from his report, and Mueller would simply say, yes, you're essentially reading my report correctly. Um. But the Republicans didn't didn't have that because they wanted to get into the question of how this investigation began, and that was clearly not something that

Mueller was going to go down. That was that goes into the whole internal workings of the investigation and the type of things that he said at the very beginning of this of a testimony he was not going to get into. So instead you did have Republicans, as you say, going aggressively after him UH, and really giving sort of long speeches and really challenging, I thought, in in a very aggressive way, um, the integrity not only of the investigation,

but of Robert Mueller himself. And I guess we'll have to see you the days ahead. Whether that was a smart move by the Republicans, I think that in his second session, so there was a first session, there's a little break. He did come back a little bit more. He did speak a little bit more, if you can call two or three sentences speak a little bit more.

But and at one thing that he did do is he did defend or try to defend the integrity of the people that worked for him and as far as contributions they'd made to Democrats, he said that I've never asked that question of anyone. So, as a former prosecutor, let me ask you, in all your time in UH as a federal prosecutor, were you ever asked about what your political affiliations were? No, you're you're not asked that question.

When you're hired by the Department of Justice. There are limitations that prohibit somebody who is works with Department of Justice from getting involved in politics. The hattack prevents you from being actively involved in politics, but it doesn't stop you from making a contribution to one political candidate or another.

And so the policy department justice has always been not to get into someone's political affiliation, because once you open that door, if you think about it, now, now you've you've created a situation where where politics and somebody's political leanings, whatever those might be, have become relevant. And so there's a bright line there that's always been followed that you just don't get into that. And Mueller I think got the most animated and spoke the most forcefullly when his

team was attacked. Um. And there were suggestions that that this was somehow biased. Um. You know that of course overlooks the fact that Mueller himself is a Republican and he was the one ultimately ultimately making the final decisions about what was in this report. I had to laugh, Bob when they questioned him about one of his associates, Andrew Wiseman's uh, one of his decisions being overturned by the Supreme Court. I mean, to bring that up in

a hearing like this shows you how much research they did. Yeah, there was a lot of work that went into it. I think on both sides, because both Republicans and Democrats were trying to figure out how they could score some political points here. There were there were really no surprises. Everybody knew that Robert Mueller was not going to answer questions that went beyond the report itself, and so there was a lot of time that went into figuring out

how they could score points for their respective political bases. Uh. And I think you know, the Republicans decided that they'd give these long winded speeches and the Democrats have sexually decided that they would quote from the report itself and simply get Mulitar acknowledge that they read the quotes correctly. So at the end of the day, it's hard to see how this hearing is going to advance um the public's view of of the Mala Report one way or

the other. I think most people have already made up their minds. That seems to be correct. And I thank you so much for joining us as always, Bob. That's from more federal prosecutor Robert Mintz. He's a partner at McCarter and English. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law podcast. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple podcasts, SoundCloud and on bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brosso. This is Bloomberg