BOB GARFIELD From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week, I'm Bob Garfield. The latest chapter of the ongoing saga of the Mueller investigation and executive branch mischief Ratcheted up yet again this week–pretty dramatically actually.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD This is Democratic senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii giving a shout out to journalists for, once again, revealing administration's misdirection.
[CLIP]
MAZIE HIRONO And now we know, thanks to a free press, that Mr. Mueller wrote your letter objecting to your so-called summary. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD Hirono was grilling Attorney General Bill Barr at a hearing Wednesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee where Democrats wanted to know why his, now infamous, four page summary mischaracterized Mueller's investigatory conclusions. And why Barr then mischaracterized the special counsel's written objections to the summary.
[CLIP]
MAZIE HIRONO When you called Mueller to discuss his letter, the reports are that he thought your summary was giving the press, Congress and the public a misleading impression of his work. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD Once again the press found itself to be a major character in the Mueller investigation narrative. Most especially when fingered by Barr at his initial press conference on the report as a sort of unindicted co-conspirator an unholy witch hunt.
[CLIP]
WILLIAM BARR There was relentless speculation in the news media about the president's personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning there was, in fact, no collusion. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD So persistent and unfair was the coverage Barr testified on Wednesday. Of course Trump would want to stop the witch hunt. And of course he can't have been found to have obstructed justice.
[CLIP]
WILLIAM BARR And he felt that this investigation was unfair, propelled by his political opponents and was--and was hampering his ability to govern. That is not a corrupt motive for replacing an independent counsel. [END CLIP]
DAHLIA LITHWICK I think it's fair to say that every president hates the press and every president feels hassled by the press.
BOB GARFIELD Dahlia Lithwick covers the courts for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus.
DAHLIA LITHWICK But the idea that, you know, in there a couple versions of this that Barr puts forward, the idea that the press made me do it is kind of anathema to the idea of a free press as, you know, we actually have sealed in amber in the first Amendment itself.
BOB GARFIELD There is a second dimension of this that also was addressed by Mueller in his report. And it concerns what the president did when a New York Times story revealed that he had tried to get White House counsel Don McGahn to intervene.
[CLIP]
MALE CORRESPONDENT Breaking news tonight from the New York Times. President Trump ordered for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to be fired--
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Tried to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last June. But Mr. Trump backed down when White House lawyer Don McGahn threatened to resign.
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Don McGann threatened to quit rather than carry out the president's order. [END CLIP]
DAHLIA LITHWICK When that story emerged, Trump ordered Don McGahn to deny that that had happened. So I think that's the lay of the land.
BOB GARFIELD So this becomes relevant in two ways. First of all, it would seem to impeach Barr's claim that the president was reacting to false news stories, to a fake news narrative. And he was just frustrated by it because the president knew in fact that the New York Times story was right all along. No?
DAHLIA LITHWICK Yeah. I think that that's exactly right. The two pieces are, one, the implication that the Times had made a mistake and set this thing in motion. And that's not right. And then I think the other thing is that Mueller explicitly found that if this was just being done to correct the press that the time had already lapsed–that didn't make sense. And so Mueller writes, 'if the president were focused solely on a press strategy that would have been one thing. But the president's efforts to do this quote for the records 10 days after the story had come out. This is long past time to issue a correction, suggests the president was not focused on a press strategy but likely contemplated the investigation and proceedings arising from it.' So that's Mueller saying I am dismissing the idea that this was just the president pushing back at the press. He was trying to get himself involved in the investigation.
BOB GARFIELD But Barr dismissed Mueller in coming to his conclusions. And then it is alleged, perjured himself before Congress in denying that he even knew that Mueller was peeved.
DAHLIA LITHWICK Yeah this is a whole other problem now is whether he committed acts of perjury because he had been asked in two different proceedings. Did Mueller have a problem with your summaries? Did he have a problem with your spin?
[CLIP]
SEN. VAN HOLLAND: Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?
WILLIAM BARR I don't know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion.
SEN. VAN HOLLAND: Reports have emerged, recently, General that members of the Special Counsel's team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24th letter. That it does not adequately or accurately, necessarily, portray the report's findings. Do you know what they're referencing with that?
WILLIAM BARR No I don't. [END CLIP]
DAHLIA LITHWICK He was holding, in his hands, a March 27th letter from Bob Mueller saying, 'you're spinning this wrong. This is not correct and people are not understanding the nuance of what I wrote. Please release my summaries.' He knew that at the time that he was testifying. Nancy Pelosi is now saying that that rises to the level of perjury and wants to see it investigated. It seems as though Democrats are trying to find a legal hook to solve the problem of Donald Trump saying nobody responds to subpoenas, nobody goes to hearings, were done with oversight. And so I think what you're hearing a little bit is casting about for some kind of legal rationale to hold folks to account if they absolutely reject the idea that there can be oversight.
BOB GARFIELD Alright back to the press because this is all On The Media--.
DAHLIA LITHWICK Right, right.
BOB GARFIELD --there is no other thing in the world.
DAHLIA LITHWICK Yes.
BOB GARFIELD These were not the only instances in which the attorney general blamed the press for his conduct. There was also the question of the timing and the nature of his various releases.
[CLIP]
WILLIAM BARR The body politic was in a high state of agitation. There was massive interest in learning what the bottom line results of Bob Mueller's investigation was–particularly as to collusion. Former government officials were confidently predicting that the president and members of his family were going to be indicted. They were people--[END CLIP]
DAHLIA LITHWICK He's talking about how dangerous it is. He's talking about this massive public hysteria. The public needed to know and I couldn't pass out bit by bit my findings. Now it was their inability to wait that forced me to cough up a hairball that turned out to not be accurate as a summary.
BOB GARFIELD There was, yet, one more thing. A fourth item where it was the press's fault. He said Mueller's objections really weren't to Barr's characterization of the Mueller Report.
[CLIP]
WILLIAM BARR And I asked him if he was suggesting that the March 24th letter was inaccurate. And he said 'no, but that the press reporting had been an accurate. And that the press was reading too much into it.' [END CLIP]
DAHLIA LITHWICK There's certainly nothing in the March 27 letter where Mueller says, 'you did a bang up job summarizing my 440 page report but that the press screwed it up.' Uh, he's fairly clear and detailed about the ways in which the failure was Barr's failure in the summaries. And again, saying please put out the summaries we created expressly for this purpose. So I think that was very much a Bill Barr gloss on the Mueller letter.
BOB GARFIELD In Barr's confirmation hearings he was asked--.
[CLIP]
Do you believe Mr. Mueller would be involved in a witch hunt against anybody?
WILLIAM BARR I don't believe Mr. Mueller would would be involved in a witch hunt. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD He was asked a similar question on April 10th and his answer then was quite different.
[CLIP]
WILLIAM BARR It really depends on where you're sitting. [END CLIP]
DAHLIA LITHWICK Haha.
BOB GARFIELD You know, I hardly even know where to start.
DAHLIA LITHWICK Well at bottom, I think it's a tribal list construction of the world where institutions are broken and processes are not legitimate and the press are all liars. Even within his own department, he was willing to call out bad behavior. He was willing to say that there were people on the Mueller team who were not in good faith. He was willing to say that there was--were ways in which Mueller, himself, was not in good faith. And I think to do that in order to call into question the legitimacy of what is supposed to be an independent legal investigation is very, very frightening. And you know, this casual language of false accusations, that's not something you throw around lightly unless you want people to lose confidence in fact finding, truth seeking institutions that are the backbone of how this country has governed itself.
BOB GARFIELD One final thing Dahlia. The Justice Department and the White House have declined to fulfill the demands, from Congress, for certain information. And Barr has refused to appear before a House committee, controlled by Democrats, on the grounds that he doesn't like the format. We often talk about, you know, we're headed towards a constitutional crisis. Isn't that the very definition of a constitutional crisis? One branch of government utterly dissing another.
DAHLIA LITHWICK Yeah, that's textbook and I think you can pull out a pretext for why you will not submit to the authority of the committee. But I think repeated acts of this nature, repeated refusals to submit to any oversight, and again the politicization, the claim that this isn't real oversight because they're the enemy.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER].
DAHLIA LITHWICK That really is fomenting what could be a really catastrophic constitutional meltdown unless everybody backs down.
BOB GARFIELD Dahlia, Thank you.
DAHLIA LITHWICK Thank you for having me.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD Dahlia Lithwick covers the courts for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD Coming up, as Jews are targeted in murderous hate crimes, dubious charges of anti-Semitism elsewhere seek to change the subject. This is On The Media.
