Mueller should watch his back by watching ours
by Tom Sullivan
"All options are on the table" is among the most hoary pronouncements in American politics. Speaker Nancy Pelosi inverted the line at an appearance in San Francisco this week, telling an audience about impeachment, "Nothing is off the table.” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), House Judiciary Committee chairman, on Friday invoked the original in telling WNYC on Friday there is "certainly" justification for impeaching Donald Trump, but the American people must support it before that happens:
“The American people right now do not support it because they do not know the story. They don’t know the facts. We have to get the facts out. We have to hold a series of hearings, we have to hold the investigations.”Nadler wants to bring former special counsel Robert Mueller's report "to life" for them.
I hope and expect this to be the only time that I will speak about this matter. I am making that decision myself—no one has told me whether I can or should testify or speak further about this matter.But Mueller's inverted, Yoda-like phrasing describing the report's findings stand in the way of the report's words speaking for themselves. He spoke them again on Wednesday, saying, "... if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that."
There has been discussion about an appearance before Congress. Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report. It contains our findings and analysis, and the reasons for the decisions we made. We chose those words carefully, and the work speaks for itself.
The report is my testimony. I would not provide information beyond that which is already public in any appearance before Congress.
Once accountability becomes a matter for Congress rather than law enforcement, everything about it becomes a de facto political spectacle. Testimony given in private makes no difference, as quiet secrecy is precisely what the president’s defenders are counting on for his defense. By contrast, the president and Attorney General Barr are clearly set on selectively and speciously declassifying elements of the investigation designed to cast the investigators in a bad light. The institutions—or the institutionalists within them—likely won’t be able to resist that pressure.Mueller refusing to testify, or agreeing to testify only behind closed doors only assists Trump's allies in covering up the very crimes he worked so assiduously to uncover.