Keeping tabs on the Mueller investigation
Juliette Kayyem pieces together what we know about the probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.
As former FBI Director Robert Mueller leads his investigation into Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election, the rest of the world has been eagerly watching for any development that could reveal where the probe is heading. Amidst the daily flood of information and analysis, it can be hard for even the most avid news consumers to keep up.
In this episode of PolicyCast, HKS Lecturer Juliette Kayyem takes a step back to provide context to the endless stream of news about the investigation, as well as discuss the potential ramifications if President Trump were to fire Mueller in a move reminiscent of Nixon’s infamous Saturday Night Massacre
The following excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.
Following the news right now feels a bit overwhelming.
Yeah, it seems like every issue is a huge issue. AS someone told me the other day, the motto of the Democrat who challenges Trump in 2020 should be “Tired of having a headache?” Whether it’s drama in the White House, or the Alabama Senate race… And then you have real dramas, like the fires in Los Angeles, North Korea, and the recognition of Jerusalem and what that’s going to mean. It’s crazy. And underneath it all is what’s happening to this presidency with this Robert Mueller investigation.
When there’s an earthquake under the ocean, there is a question about whether there’s going to be a tsunami after. And so they measure the water to see if it’s going out to the ocean. There’s been an earthquake with the election of Donald Trump, and we’re measuring the water to see if there’s a tsunami after it.
It seems like there’s a lot of reading tea leaves at this point.
Yeah it is, and I think any analyst of the investigation has to be super careful. I’ve even made mistakes. You can’t read too much into anything, and you have to be dependent on reporters that you trust. In a world like this, honestly I even have to be careful about what I retweet because it’s a lot of reading tea leaves now.
There are things that we do know because they’ve been validated in some of the public documents coming out of the Mueller investigation, but certainly the question that Mueller has been asked to answer — was there direct collusion — is one that we don’t know yet.
So let’s talk about that word collusion. Is that what we really should be focused on? Because there have been a lot of charges that don’t necessarily amount to collusion.
How you have to think about building a case is you first get evidence, and as you put the connective tissue together, the evidence is either going to lead you to a benign explanation or a really, really scary one. So let’s just put collusion on the end of that scale. Collusion would be active cooperation between the Trump campaign and a foreign entity to alter the outcome of the election.
We’re not at collusion yet. But we are so far from benign. In other words, we’re somewhere much closer to collusion.
Remember how far we are from the Trump administration’s explanation. They started by saying there was no contact with Russian officials. Now we know there were dozens of contacts that were not disclosed, that were lied about, that were denied. So there’s a lot of different pieces, but in their totality a theory of the case is being built.
The question before Mueller is, “what happened in the election?” … So it could be that the explanation is incredibly damning, but that there’s going to be no criminal indictments outside of obstruction of justice.
For people who can’t follow along all the time, one thing to focus on is all the lies. I don’t think the Trump people get the benefit of the doubt anymore. If they say two plus two equals four, I’m still going to doubt that at this stage because the lies have been so consistent.
Another is to remember that Mueller was designated in response to the firing of FBI Director James Comey, and the refusal of the attorney general to look at what was a counter-intelligence case. The question before Mueller is, “what happened in the election?” So prosecuting people may not be his number one goal. His duty is to create a report for the senior leadership of the Department of Justice that explains what happened in the election. So it could be that the explanation is incredibly damning, but that there’s going to be no criminal indictments outside of obstruction of justice. That’s what we don’t know now.
There’s one final thing. The defense by the Trump administration has gone from “there was no contact,” to “there was minor contact,” to “there was contact, but it wasn’t collusion,” to “collusion is not a crime,” to “the president cannot obstruct justice.” I want everyone to take a deep breath with that one.
Although the the president has said they’re not going to be using that defense.
The president’s White House lawyers have said that, the president’s personal lawyers have not. And you just don’t know what’s going on with his legal team. I think he has White House lawyers who recognize they represent the president of the United States, and he has his outside lawyers. Trump surrounds himself with whomever will tell them what he wants to hear at that moment.
If collusion isn’t there, do these other things matter?
You would think.
I think the narrative has benefited Trump in that all this activity somehow gets dismissed because of the focus on that eureka moment. But if you just look at all of this activity in its totality, all of the contacts the WikiLeaks, the fact that meetings about adoptions were really about sanctions, the calling of the ambassadors that are lied about. In any rational world in which there was a responsive Senate and House, that would be enough.
I tend to use the word cooperation because I think what you can prove is that the Trump campaign cooperated, or was willing to cooperate, with all these random Russians. And that it was a very smart counterintelligence effort by the Russians to infiltrate either the failed candidate or the future president of the United States.
There is of course another issue which we’re not talking about today, which is Russia’s other disinformation campaign on Facebook and Twitter. I only mention it here because people tend to think about it all together. There’s no proof of a connection there. Russia had a propaganda campaign directed towards certain jurisdictions, and what we don’t know is if the Russians directed were by Jared Kushner and the data management team on the Trump campaign. We haven’t heard much about that lately, but that certainly would be signs of collusion if you’re directing a foreign entity to essentially alter reality for people.
Each week on PolicyCast, Host Matt Cadwallader (@mattcad) explores the ways individuals make democracy work by speaking with the world’s leading experts in public policy, media, and international affairs about their experiences confronting our most pressing public problems.
