The Russia investigation may be over but the effort to discredit it is still going strong. Former special counsel Robert Mueller was on Capitol Hill yesterday, and the Republican lines of attack against him said a lot about how Trump allies plan to undercut his report while they await Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation. So what are the big themes Republicans are using to try and take the Mueller report down?
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Trump allies have spent the past two years coming up with countless criticisms of Mueller and his work. But with the national spotlight on for Wednesday’s hearing and only five minutes per person to question Mueller, Republicans had to pick what they thought were their best lines of attack. Instead of using their time to question Mueller, they talked over him and hammered home a few consistent themes criticizing his report.
Fruit of the poison tree
The most common theme emphasized by Republicans was that the Russia investigation was conceived in sin. Mueller warned lawmakers that he wouldn’t discuss the origins of the investigation because it’s currently the subject of a fairly controversial Justice Department investigation announced by Attorney General Barr. But Republicans pressed on with their theory that the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign was a secret plot by the FBI to undermine Trump’s presidential chances.
The FBI’s investigation, dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane,” began when the Australian government warned the U.S. that Trump campaign adviser George Papadapoulos had said that Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud admitted that Russia was in possession of Clinton campaign emails and would use them against Hillary Clinton in the election.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) barked at Mueller about whether Mifsud was “western intelligence or Russian intelligence?” and then wondered aloud why the special counsel hadn’t charged Mifsud with lying to the FBI when it had charged others. The implication—long trumpeted by Trump allies like House Intel Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA)—is that Mifsud was an intelligence community plant sent to entrap the Trump campaign and offer a pretext to launch an investigation.
No puppet, you’re the puppet
Trump allies have never been comfortable with the conclusion of both the intelligence community and the special counsel’s office that Russia interfered with the 2016 election for the specific purpose of helping Trump. When Nunes held the gavel at House Intel, his report into Russian meddling criticized the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment for reaching that conclusion and accused analysts of poor analytic tradecraft.
On Wednesday, House Republicans tried to skip past that conclusion by painting the Clinton campaign as the recipient of alleged Russian help. Nunes, along with Reps. Steve Chabot (R-OH) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL), insinuated that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian-government connected lobbyist who offered dirt on Clinton to senior Trump campaign officials during a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, was either a Russian government or Democratic plant (or both) sent to make Trump look bad.
The insinuation derives from the fact that Fusion GPS, the company that hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele for work on what would become the “Steele Dossier,” also worked alongside Veselnitskaya’s client, Prevezon, when the Justice Department accused it of laundering money for Russian oligarchs. NBC reported that some of the dirt Veselnitskata planned to offer to the Trump campaign had been dug up by Fusion and Republican lawmakers blasted Mueller for not investigating this.
In reality, Veselnitskaya pitched her Trump Tower meeting as an opportunity to share dirt courtesy of the Russian government—an offer welcomed by Donald Trump Jr. with “I love it.” But Republicans like Chabot blasted Mueller’s report as “a pretty one-sided attack on the president” because his final report didn’t include material on Fusion’s relationship with Veselnitskaya
Man of Steele
Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) mentioned another Fusion-related attack to suggest that the Steele dossier, and its more salacious allegations, was actually Russia’s way of pulling for Hillary. Under this line of argument—not supported by either the special counsel or the intelligence community—Steele’s sources were supposedly under the control of the Kremlin and feeding him disinformation.
Ratcliffe, reportedly under consideration by Trump for a job as his next director of national intelligence, asked Mueller if he’d investigated "whether the Steele Dossier was part of the Russian government efforts to interfere in the 2016 election" and whether Russia had interfered "by providing false information through sources to Christopher Steele about a Trump conspiracy.” Gaetz joined in and suggested via a question to Mueller whether he had “confidence that the Steele dossier was not part of Russia’s disinformation campaign.”
Mueller didn’t take the bait and, for the umpteenth time, reminded the lawmakers that he was unable to discuss a subject currently under investigation by the Justice Department. But the unanswered questions achieved their objective in airing Trump allies’ talking points for the thousands tuning in to the hearings.
Off his game
#Resistance types have spent much of the past two years painting Mueller as a white knight ready to do battle with President Trump and his defenders over the Russia investigation. Before Congress on Wednesday, Mueller faced off against a number of lawmakers lobbing everything from softballs, questions he couldn’t answer because of Justice Department policy, and shouty rants with no actual questions inside of them.
Against that kind of questioning, you’d think Mueller could hold his own. Instead, Mueller appeared frail and lost at times. He frequently stuttered and asked lawmakers to repeat their questions. At one point, Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the top Republican on the Judiciary committee, tripped up Mueller on a question about whether the word “collusion” meant more or less the same thing as “conspiracy”—a point the Mueller report had made in the report but one he contradicted under questioning.
The shaky performance wasn’t just a matter of optics, it created genuine confusion. Under questioning from Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), Mueller sounded like he’d concluded that Trump was guilty of obstruction and that the only thing stopping him from bringing charges was Justice Department policy prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president. When he appeared before the House intelligence committee hours later, Mueller had to walk that back.
