Department Of Lowered Expectations: Mueller's Testimony Likely To Disappoint

KEVIN LAMARQUE /  REUTERS

A comical although not funny ha-ha sidelight of the nightmare Donald "Complete and Total Exoneration" Trump has inflicted on America is his ability to keep stepping on his willie.   

Trump, who reliably continues to act like the guilty criminal and agent for Vladimir Putin that he is, now says he does not want Robert Mueller to testify before Congress after saying that if Attorney General William Barr approves an appearance by the special counsel, then it's okey-dokey with him.  Barr, in fact, has approved Mueller testifying, and he is (very) tentatively scheduled to answer questions from the House Judiciary Committee on May 15. 

What now? 

Trump's about-face -- which comes hot on the heels of his demanding that Barr not share an unredacted version of Mueller's 448-page report on his Russia scandal investigation after saying that also was okey-dokey with him -- puts welcome pressure on both president and lapdog. 

Barr, of course, has proven himself a worthy toady in whitewashing Mueller's deeply damaging report and not acting as the independent attorney general and chief law enforcement officer (emphasis mine) that his oath and the Constitution require. 

So does Barr now do his own about-face and again cave in to Trump?  Or should he take a break from dissembling and tell the president in his most obsequious tone of voice that Mueller should be allowed to testify?    

I don't know what Barr may decide, but I do know that Mueller is likely to disappoint when and if he does testify. 

This is because we know enough about the Barr-redacted version of the report, as well as a pretty good idea of what many of the blacked-out passages say, to conclude that Trump repeatedly violated his oath and constitutional obligations.  

Mueller and his investigators found Russia wanted to help the Trump campaign, the Trump campaign was willing to take that help because it expected to benefit at the ballot box, Trump himself repeatedly pushed for obtaining Hillary Clinton's private emails and was well in the loop himself, including knowing when WikiLeaks would release more damaging information in the form of Russian-hacked emails. 

We also can conclude that Mueller and his investigators found that Trump's repeated efforts to obstruct justice sometimes failed only because his staffers refused to carry out his orders, and to be more precise, Trump did succeed in obstructing in at least 10 instances, but as president can't be indicted, a hugely important but widely misunderstood conclusion.   

Also lost in the sauce is that Mueller inferred in his report that it was now up to Congress to pursue the obstruction question.  And that the deep-state conspiracy theories -- that Mueller and the FBI were out to get Trump -- collapse because of the utter lack of evidence, the natterings of Trump, Barr and the right-wing sycophancy notwithstanding.

Given the opportunity, the ever circumspect Mueller will be repeating his conclusions to the Judiciary Committee (and hopefully the House Intelligence Committee, as well), but do not expect much beyond him helpfully citing the pages and paragraphs where these conclusions appear in his report. 

That will be a big and anticlimactic yawn, but where Mueller might salvage a committee appearance and further cement a positive historic legacy is in testifying to the ugly particulars of his unsuccessful efforts to get Barr to lay off the whitewash, which included a letter to the AG that he described as "snitty." 

(Technically, Mueller still is a special counsel on the Justice Department payroll.  If that is used as an excuse to prevent him from testifying, he will soon be a private citizen and presumably would be free to blab.)   

Barr blew off an appearance last Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee the day after obfuscating his way through a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee. 

He is now looking down the barrel of a House Judiciary Committee contempt citation for refusing to provide an unredacted copy of the report by a May 1 deadline as Trump comically blathers on about how two years of his presidency were "stolen" by that nasty Mueller and a duplicitous FBI, his former lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen begins a three-year prison sentence vowing that he has "more to tell," and more than 600 former Justice Department prosecutors stated in an open letter released on Monday that Trump would be facing multiple felony charges if he were not president. 

That extraordinary number of prosecutors, including U.S. attorneys who served presidents from the Eisenhower administration onward, is a powerful rebuttal to Barr's contention that the evidence Mueller uncovered was "not sufficient" to establish that Trump committed a crime. 

Among the high-profile signers are Bill Weld, a former U.S. attorney and Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who is running against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination; Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration; John S. Martin, a former U.S. attorney and federal judge appointed to his posts by Republican presidents; Paul Rosenzweig, who served as senior counsel to independent counsel Ken Starr; and Jeffrey Harris, who worked as the principal assistant to Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani when he was at the Justice Department in the Reagan administration. 

"All of this conduct -- trying to control and impede the investigation against the President by leveraging his authority over others -- is similar to conduct we have seen charged against other public officials and people in powerful positions," the former prosecutors wrote.  They said that prosecuting such cases was "critical because unchecked obstruction --which allows intentional interference with criminal investigations to go unpunished --  puts our whole system of justice at risk.” 

True, and that is why the House Democratic leadership is tiptoeing toward initiating impeachment proceedings against Trump. 

Beyond providing yet more fodder for "Saturday Night Live" cold opens, these developments further escalate the battle royale between a president who believes himself above the law and a Congress -- the Democrats, anyway -- demanding that he adhere to the Constitutional and submit to oversight. 

This, as they say, will not end well. 

Click HERE for a searchable version of the Mueller report.

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal
 and related developments.