WASHINGTON, March 26, 2019 — A day after Attorney General William Barr told Congress that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had found President Donald Trump to have neither “colluded” with Russia during the 2016 election nor obstructed the investigation into alleged collusion, President Trump and Republicans are out for revenge. Democrats are vowing to press on in their search for answers.
Initial reactions from the White House focused on Barr’s declaration that Mueller “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” during the 2016 election, and on his own finding that Trump’s conduct over the course of the investigation — including his decision to fire then-FBI Director
James Comey in May 2017 — did not fulfill the elements of the crime of obstruction of justice.
Although Barr noted in his letter to Congress that Mueller himself had stated that the report “does not exonerate” Trump, both the President and his advisors characterized Barr’s interpretation of Mueller’s report as leaving him completely exonerated.
While some observers characterized Barr’s letter was a chance for Trump to “reset” his presidency, it wasn’t 24 hours before Trump and his advisors began to hit back against those who, having conducted, supported, or reported on the investigation, had purportedly shown themselves to be enemies of the President.
Speaking to reporters outside the West Wing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders set the tone for the day by casting an investigation that was conducted by a Republican administration’s Justice Department, led by lifelong Republican Robert Mueller, and overseen by Republican — and Trump appointee — Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, as a waste of money and a coup attempt by Democrats and the press.
“I think that it’s disgraceful that we had $25 million in taxpayer money to chase a witch hunt that shouldn’t have taken place in the first place. I think Democrats and the liberal media should be absolutely embarrassed by their behavior over the last few years, by their breathless reporting,” Sanders said.
“It’s not just that they reported and spread a slanderous and malicious lie, but that they hoped for the takedown of the President of the United States.”
Sanders later took to her official government Twitter account to circulate a New York Post image of a mock NCAA basketball tournament “bracket” entitled “Mueller Madness,” which encouraged readers to vote for who’d be crowned “the worst” of the 64 Trump critics drawn from not just the print and television news media, but also comedians, network sitcom producers, and late-night television hosts.
One of Sanders’ counterparts from Trump’s reelection campaign also went beyond generalized attacks on the media by circulating documents reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s so-called enemies list.
Network news producers who checked their email on Monday found a memorandum from Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh and bearing the subject line: “Credibility of Certain Guests.”
The memorandum, which was first reported by Axios’s Jonathan Swan, advises producers against booking a number of current and former government officials who’ve criticized President Trump over his alleged ties to Russia and obsequious attitude towards Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Among those Murtaugh’s memo advises the networks to blacklist are the current chairmen of the House Judiciary Committee and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Reps. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. and Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
Other elected officials targeted by Murtaugh are Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat and member of the Intelligence Committee whose many TV appearances have given him a national following, and Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, who Trump has repeatedly attacked over his Vietnam-era service record. Rounding out the target list are Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and John Brennan, the former CIA director and Trump critic who the president retaliated against last year by ordering his security clearance to be revoked.
“Moving forward, we ask that you employ basic journalistic standards when booking such guests to appear anywhere in your universe of productions,” Murtaugh wrote before advising producers to ask themselves the “basic question” of whether any of those he’d named “warrant further appearances in our programming, given the outrageous and unsupported claims made in the past.”
But the Trump administration’s plans for revenge may not be limited to his perceived enemies in the press. During an interview with the PBS Newshour’s Judy Woodruff, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway said she agreed with Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani and other Trump allies, who’ve called for the FBI and the entire Justice Department needed to be investigated for what Giuliani and others have characterized as an attempted coup.
“I think their point is, the Justice Department, the FBI, the shenanigans that were happening when Comey and McCabe and Strzok and Page and Ohr and the rest of that lot were there ridiculing the Trump voters, smelly Wal-Mart shoppers and things like that, saying they needed a — quote — “insurance policy” to make sure he wouldn’t be the president,” Conway said, rattling off a list of FBI officials who’ve become a staple of right-wing conspiracy theories over the past few years.
“I think, in the interest of full accountability, transparency in our great democracy, the public has a right to know what folks were doing to try to subvert a newly democratically elected president,” she added.
The President himself joined in as well, telling reporters that the conduct of those who’d supported — or reported on — the Mueller investigation had been “evil” and “treasonous.”
“There are a lot of people out there that have done some very, very evil things, very bad things — I would say treasonous things — against our country,” Trump said Monday as he stood alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We can never, ever let this happen to another President again,” he added.
While Trump and his allies appeared to plot their revenge, House Democrats vowed to obtain Mueller’s full report and press on with their investigations, no matter what the President might say.
“We can’t worry about what he’s going to say. We have to worry about the American people and about vindicating the rule of law in America,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who serves on both the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees.
Raskin stressed that Democrats are not talking about impeachment, only about getting to the facts, adding that the American people do not want Democrats to simply fold up their tents and go home based on the assertions made by Attorney General Barr, who he called an “unreliable narrator” on the subject of Mueller’s report.
“He already, long ago, committed himself on the point that the president’s cannot be found guilty of obstructing justice,” he said, referring to Barr’s authorship of a memorandum arguing that the President cannot obstruct justice when acting as the head of the executive branch.
White House officials contacted by BeltwayBreakfast rejected Raskin’s assertion that Barr is “the last person that question [obstruction] should have been left to” by noting that the attorney general’s letter specifically denied that his views on the president’s authority over the executive branch factored into his judgment that Trump had not committed obstruction of justice.
Nevertheless, Raskin compared Barr’s presentation of Mueller’s findings to a high school book report by a student who’d read the Cliff’s Notes on the book instead of the book itself. Raskin said that he and his House colleagues are determined to get a look at both the full report and the underlying evidence used to compile it.
“I have a million questions about brief précis that was advanced to us by the attorney general,” he said, adding that the “opaque, inscrutable, and slippery” language in Barr’s letter “[generates] dozens of questions about what exactly is being asserted by the Attorney General and what was actually found by the Special Counsel.”
