One function of the testimony that Robert Mueller, the special counsel who oversaw the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, delivered before two House committees last week was to illustrate how various factions in Washington have come to speak different languages. The words may be the same, but the meanings are not. “Un-American,” in the lexicon of Representative Denny Heck, Democrat of Washington, describes people in Donald Trump’s orbit who seek to cash in on their positions when dealing with Russians. For Representative Guy Reschenthaler, Republican of Pennsylvania, “un-American” means Mueller’s decision to include in his investigation’s report so much negative information about a man “who happens to be the President of the United States.” It’s hardly a wonder that Mueller occasionally appeared confused. Each time the questioning swung between the Democrats and the Republicans, he had to switch vernaculars.
More than that, Mueller had to navigate two different narrative realms. In the one more grounded in his report, Democrat after Democrat argued that, if Trump were not the President, he would have been charged with obstruction of justice. In an exchange with Representative Ted Lieu, of California, Mueller briefly appeared to agree that a Justice Department legal opinion that precludes charging a sitting President was all that had stopped him from doing so—but later clarified that, because of that opinion, he never got to the point of deciding whether an indictment was merited.
Meanwhile, the excitable Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, demanded to know why Mueller had charged “thirteen Russians no one’s ever heard of” but not “the guy who puts the country through this whole saga!” He meant not Donald Trump but Joseph Mifsud, whom he identified as a “mysterious professor who works in Rome and London,” and a key figure in the theory, popular on Fox News, that the Trump campaign’s alleged Russia contacts were actually just a cleverly engineered setup. As Jordan berated Mueller, he proclaimed what he called “the good news”: Attorney General William Barr is on the case. This was a reference to Barr’s commitment to an inquiry by Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice’s inspector general, of the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign that the F.B.I. opened in 2016, and Barr’s appointment of John Durham, the Connecticut U.S. Attorney, to review the whole affair. The Wall Street Journal said that “Barr will never have a more important assignment” than pursuing the matter. Lindsey Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, has also pledged to hold hearings.
Among other things, Horowitz’s investigation concerns how officials handled a dossier assembled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent with experience in Russia, who was working for a company called Fusion GPS, which had been retained by a law firm hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The dossier relates some wild claims—for instance, that “knowledgeable sources” said the Russians had compromising sexual material on Trump—which have never been substantiated. The thesis on the Trump side is that the dossier was a Russian disinformation operation, in which Clinton was complicit; in other words, that’s the real collusion.
Mueller, citing the Justice Department’s continuing inquiries, said that the dossier was “beyond my purview,” which only further incensed his questioners. So central has the dossier become to the Republican narrative of Trump’s victimhood that, when Mueller appeared slow to recognize the name Fusion GPS, some Fox News figures were left slack-jawed. (“What does that say about Robert Mueller?” Tucker Carlson asked. “This isn’t a medical program, so we’re not going to speculate.”) Trump retweeted the clip.
There are questions worth exploring about the Steele dossier, having to do with, say, the transparency of campaign spending. But they are not the questions congressional Republicans are asking. As in their prolonged hearings into the attack on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, they are likely to twist any useful threads into an unedifying tangle. This time, though, the Republicans are engaging in an even more dangerous delusion. The pretense is that, as long as they keep talking about mysterious professors and British spies, they aren’t ignoring the threat that Russia and other foreign powers continue to pose to the integrity of American elections. Hillary Clinton is, once again, their excuse for inaction.
The urgency of focussing on election security was one of Mueller’s key messages. It was underscored a day later, when the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report indicating that, in 2016, the Russian government likely probed American voting systems in all fifty states. (Many of the state systems are known to be vulnerable.) The attempts appear to have been mostly exploratory. They may go further, though, in 2020, and Russia might not be the only perpetrator. And yet, that same day, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell killed legislation aimed at bolstering election security, saying that Democrats were just looking for a “political benefit.”
It’s not clear that the Republican Party can still conceive of a definition of the country’s interests—or of itself—that does not include support for Trump. It was thus all the more striking, during Mueller’s testimony, when certain Democrats seemed to be speaking his language—that of a straightforward officer of the law. One such moment came when Val Demings, of Florida, previously Orlando’s chief of police, asked about the written responses that Trump had submitted to Mueller, in lieu of sitting for an interview with his investigators. Was it true that Trump “simply didn’t answer” many questions? Mueller: “True.” Did he give answers that “contradicted other evidence?” Mueller: “Yes.” Could Mueller say that “the President was credible?” Mueller: “I can’t answer that question.”
Was it fair to say, Demings continued, that the President’s answers were not only inadequate but “showed that he wasn’t always being truthful?” Mueller: “I would say, generally.” That exchange is almost a catechism for keeping one’s bearings amid the tumult of a truth-mocking Presidency. Such a task won’t be easy in what is bound to be a bitter election, when the contested terms will include not only “un-American” but a more essential one: “American.” ♦
