President Donald Trump cried foul after Robert Mueller made last-minute changes to the terms of his much-anticipated testimony on Wednesday, Fox News reports. At the eleventh hour, Mueller requested that his former chief of staff and Deputy Special Counsel Aaron Zebley sit at the witness table alongside him.
“It was NEVER agreed that Robert Mueller could use one of his many Democrat Never Trumper lawyers to sit next to him with his answers,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. “This was specifically NOT agreed to, and I would NEVER have agreed to it. The Greatest Witch Hunt in U.S. history, by far!”
Mueller testimony backfires spectacularly
Republicans including Jim Jordan (R-OH) sounded the alarm Tuesday about the last-minute shift after House Democrats agreed to let Zebley join Mueller, but their concern proved to be premature. The New York Post summarized the back-to-back hearings as a “waste of everyone’s time” — and that it was.
Whatever impeachment case the Democrats hoped Mueller would bring out was quickly embalmed amid the special counsel’s doddering testimony, which not only failed to highlight the report’s contents, but called into question the integrity of Mueller’s entire investigation.
Mueller’s testimony came reluctantly after Democrats subpoenaed him last month. He was showing signs of frailty in May, when the until-then silent prosecutor, who loomed largely over the Trump presidency and the American mind for almost two years, spoke about his probe for the first time. He sounded feeble then, but he left Democrats with some hope when he said that indicting Trump was “not an option.”
But Democrats were not prepared for what ensued on Wednesday. While Mueller did dish out some red meat — he flatly dismissed President Trump’s claims of “total exoneration,” fired back at Trump’s “witch hunt” label, and called Trump’s embrace of WikiLeaks “problematic,” according to The Hill — for the most part, Mueller appeared confused and often only faintly familiar with the contents of his more than 400-page report.
An embarrassing performance
Indeed, what few victories Mueller gave to the Democrats were obscured by the overall embarrassment of his performance. In the second hearing, Mueller walked back his earlier statement that he would have indicted Trump for obstruction if not for a DOJ opinion against charging presidents with crimes — which was the soundbite Democrats were hoping for.
“The reason that you did not indict the president is because of the [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) asked. Mueller initially replied, “Correct,” but later backtracked, saying, “As we say in the report and as I said at the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the President committed a crime.”
The special counsel even tripped up on aspects of his own biography, as he struggled to recall which president appointed him to a U.S. attorney’s post in the 1980s. Before Mueller was finished, the White House was in “euphoria,” Politico reported, and even Democrats declared the hearings a “disaster.”
Republicans hammer the special counsel
Meanwhile, Republicans went on the offensive and hammered Mueller for his unusual decision to “not exonerate” Trump, as well as long-standing allegations that the investigation was politically motivated. Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (WI) hit Mueller for “fishing” by continuing to prosecute Trump for obstruction of justice without charging him with a crime, and Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) got him to state plainly that his investigation was not hindered in any way.
But in terms of new information, Republicans walked away equally empty-handed as the Democrats. Republicans who came prepared to grill Mueller about the origins of the Russian “witch hunt” and alleged spying abuses by the FBI and DOJ were repeatedly told by the special counsel that their inquiries were “not in my purview.”
“A resistance-driven partisan witch hunt”
Mueller’s evasiveness only affirmed what many Republicans had long said — that his investigation was politically motivated — while his difficulty with answering questions raised more fundamental doubts about whether his investigation was conducted fairly and completely, as Democrats have long argued.
Many conservative commentators on Twitter balked at Mueller’s admission that he was not familiar with Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm behind the infamous Christopher Steele dossier. In Mueller’s report, he referred to the “firm that produced the Steele reporting.”
Mueller’s unawareness of Fusion GPS was one reason why many spectators were left saying that Mueller must have deputized the investigation to prosecutors — prosecutors who were, significantly, all Democrats.
“The more this hearing goes on, the more it becomes painfully clear that not only did Bob Mueller not write his own report — he was barely involved or in control of it at all. You know who was? His team of Democrats,” tweeted Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC). “This was a resistance-driven partisan witch hunt all along.”
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