michael schmidt

Hello? Hello? Hello?

maggie haberman

Hello.

michael schmidt

Maggie?

maggie haberman

Hi.

michael schmidt

Can you hear me?

maggie haberman

Yes, can you hear me?

michael schmidt

Yeah, hold on, hold on, hold on. Wearing two headphones right now.

maggie haberman

Mm. Sounds about right.

michael schmidt

Can you hear me? Oh, that’s better.

maggie haberman

We gotcha. We’re just waiting on the star.

michael barbaro

Hi.

maggie haberman

It’s Michael Barbaro, host of “The Daily.”

michael schmidt

Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today — Attorney General William Barr has sent a letter to Congress summarizing the findings of the special counsel investigation: No coordination with Russia. More complicated on obstruction of justice. My colleagues Maggie Haberman and Mike Schmidt explain. It’s Monday, March 25. O.K. Maggie, like, it is 6:00 p.m. on Sunday evening. Two hours ago, the attorney general, Bill Barr, sent a letter to congressional leaders outlining the major conclusions of the special counsel’s report.

michael schmidt

The report is broken into two parts. The first one is on the biggest, most central question that has surrounded the president since he was elected: What are the ties between his campaign and Russia? And on that issue, Barr is unequivocal.

michael barbaro

What does he say?

michael schmidt

He says there are no ties between what Russia did in the election and Trump’s campaign. That despite how aggressively the Russians tried to interfere in our election, and even outreach that they made to the campaign, they were able to find no evidence that they actually worked together.

michael barbaro

But Mike, help me understand this. In the lead-up to the report, the Mueller investigation issued a number of subpoenas and charges that felt like they revealed forms of collusion. I’m thinking about Papadopoulos, Manafort, a meeting inside Trump Tower that involved the president’s son and his son-in-law. Those all felt like forms of collusion.

michael schmidt

I think that what went on was that the Trump campaign was sort of collusion-curious in the sense that they were open to sort of talking to anyone about anything. And the Russians were reaching out right. And that meant that there were a lot of odd contacts that occurred. What I think Mueller and Barr are saying is that even though a lot of that stuff looks funky, we have no evidence that they linked hands and tried to work together to hurt Clinton.

michael barbaro

So collusion-curious does not equal coordination.

maggie haberman

No. Being interested in getting information is something that you have heard either the president say or people around the president say. You know, of course, we took these meetings. Of course when people reached out to us, we listened to them. Who wouldn’t? Their argument has been that they were just doing what anyone would do. And the other argument they’ve made repeatedly is that they were too discombobulated and too green and too new at this to even know how to collude. And as someone who covered that campaign, I can tell you there is some logic to that argument.

michael barbaro

As somebody who’s slightly more removed from the day to day of this investigation than either of you, it’s starting to feel from this summary from Bill Barr of the Mueller report that what the investigation found was what we all kind of knew the investigation found as it was finding. That there was nothing all that big being held back. And that helps us understand this conclusion.

maggie haberman

What we saw in indictments either of Paul Manafort, or of his deputy Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty, or of Mike Flynn or George Papadopoulos, this might have been, it seems, all there was. This was all the information that they were able to prove existed.

michael barbaro

Mike, what do you think of that?

michael schmidt

Let’s go back and look at the indictments and guilty pleas. George Papadopoulos, a campaign official who had contacts with individuals who said the Russians were going to be releasing information about Hillary Clinton’s emails before it came out. When George Papadopoulos pleads guilty, he does not plead guilty to conspiring with the Russians. He pleads guilty to making false statements to investigators about that contact. The president’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has these odd phone calls with the Russian ambassador during the transition in which they discuss lifting sanctions that have just been imposed by the Obama administration for election meddling. When Mike Flynn goes into court to plead guilty, he doesn’t plead guilty to conspiring with the Russians. He pleads guilty to making false statements to the F.B.I. about it. So as we went along in the investigation over the past 22 months, we never saw charges that said that the campaign conspired with Russia. There was some question — was Mueller holding out something like that until the end? Was he going to wait and then make a move on it? Well, today, we know that they never found anything.

michael barbaro

Right. He wasn’t making those kinds of indictments because he didn’t have any evidence of it.

maggie haberman

Or at least he didn’t have enough to bring an indictment. I mean, he might have found strains of information, he might have found pieces along the way, but it clearly was not enough to bring a charge.

michael barbaro

So in the end, this was a bunch of people around the president lying, perhaps to avoid what might look like coordination if they were going to tell the truth, but not actually coordinating, according to the legal definition.

michael schmidt

Correct.

michael barbaro

And what about the second question in this letter, the question of obstruction of justice? What does Barr’s summary of the Mueller report say about that?

michael schmidt

So the obstruction part is not nearly as clean-cut as the collusion section. On obstruction, Barr essentially says that Mueller did not come to his own determination on whether the president obstructed justice. That Mueller could not indict or exonerate the president for that charge. But that left the door open for Barr to say, look, Mueller has not made a determination on this. I, as the attorney general, along with the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, will make that call. And we do not believe there is a case to be made the president obstructed justice.

michael barbaro

I don’t quite understand what’s going on here. Why do we think, Mike, that Mueller declined to weigh in on this question of obstruction of justice? Why leave it kind of up in the air?

maggie haberman

There’s not really a full explanation for that. And I’m not sure. For the past 22 months, Democrats and a lot of folks in the media have built Mueller up as sort of this paragon of justice, and someone who was willing and able to go out and make determinations and calls on really tough issues in non-partisan, follow-the-facts ways. And here, we have Mueller essentially saying, I don’t really have a determination on it. For each of the relevant actions, the letter says, that were investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the special counsel views as, quote, “difficult issues of law and fact concerning whether the president’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.” The special counsel states that, quote, “while this report does not conclude the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

michael barbaro

Let’s pick apart what I think we can all agree is the most salient example of this, where maybe disentangling motive and law and obstruction of justice is really tangled up. And that would be the firing of James Comey. The president at first says it’s not about Russia, then goes on television, says, it really is about Russia. And yet we all know that the president can pretty much fire anyone at that level if he wants to. Is that what Bill Barr, in summarizing Mueller, is saying? That this stuff is just really difficult, and so we’re not making a call?

maggie haberman

Mueller is saying this is really difficult, and it’s hard to get in the president’s head and know what his intent was and his frame of mind was. And he decides that he is not going to be the one to make that call. Bill Barr, not wanting, I think, to leave this as an open-ended thing puts a pin in it and says, this is done.

michael barbaro

And says, I will make that call.

maggie haberman

I will make that call. And we do not believe that this is sufficient to say that the president obstructed justice. And remember, obstruction of justice was key to Richard Nixon. This was a piece that the president’s folks were worried about. They had felt really confident the whole time that there would not be an evidence-based case of conspiracy related to Russia. But they were concerned about what it would find on the obstruction piece.

michael schmidt

Interestingly — and I still don’t think this issue has gotten enough attention — the central question here was the president’s intent when he took actions like firing Comey. But at the end of the day, the president of the United States never sat for an interview with investigators to answer those questions. So here you have the attorney general saying, this thing is done, but we’ve never heard from Donald Trump on it. And the reason we never heard from Donald Trump on it was that his lawyers were so afraid that if he sat down to answer questions, he would make a factually inaccurate statement and would increase his criminal exposure.

michael barbaro

And it’s within the president’s rights not to sit down for such an interview.

michael schmidt

That’s not true. The Justice Department could have subpoenaed him for an interview.

michael barbaro

But why didn’t they?

michael schmidt

One of the unanswered questions in this. But in an investigation where the central question was what was the president’s intent, Bob Mueller was never able to ask him that question.

michael barbaro

But he wasn’t able to ask him the question because he never issued a subpoena. He never pursued all legal avenues?

maggie haberman

We don’t know whether he pursued a legal avenue and was told that there wasn’t sufficient anything to go get a subpoena, or whether he just didn’t seek one. And that is, to me right now as we sit here, an open question. I don’t know whether Bob Mueller actually sought to go after this subpoena, which a lot of people thought that he would do. We’re not going to know for some time.

michael schmidt

But what we did learn on Friday when Barr first announced the end of the Mueller investigation was there was no instance in the investigation where Mueller wanted to take a major step, like indict someone, or subpoena them, or get a search warrant, in which he was told by his superiors at the Justice Department that he could not do that. So that would sort of bolster the argument that Mueller was not stopped by the Justice Department from seeking a subpoena to interview the president. He’s saying there were no instances in which Mueller was stopped from moving forward with something he wanted to do.

michael barbaro

No matter what, in this moment where so much of this second question of obstruction of justice comes down to the president’s motivation, which is essentially a matter of getting into someone’s head, never hearing from President Trump feels very significant.

maggie haberman

It’s a huge deal. Barr lays it out in this letter to Congress about what Mueller’s thinking was, where he describes that the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question. And I think what you have there is the president’s lawyers have repeatedly offered up explanations for why the president could have been doing something that were not necessarily nefarious or that were not undermining. And the main thing that they have said over and over is, this isn’t obstruction because it’s all playing out in public. It’s not hidden. He has a right to express his views as a citizen of the country. And I anticipate that should we ever see what is in this report, that is going to show up a lot.

michael schmidt

When Maggie and I would talk to Rudy Giuliani during the investigation —

michael barbaro

The president’s lawyer.

michael schmidt

He would say things like, obstruction of justice and trying to interfere in an investigation is going into a dark alley and threatening to break someone’s leg if they cooperate with investigators. It’s bribing someone to not testify. But what Giuliani said is that all this stuff is happening out in the open. He’s not trying to twist anyone’s arm. He’s just blowing off steam about the investigation. And what conspiracy is there in that?

michael barbaro

Were either of you surprised by either of these actions outlined in this letter when it comes to obstruction of justice — by Mueller declining to make a call, or by Barr being so quick to make a call?

maggie haberman

I was not surprised that Mueller didn’t make a call. I was surprised that Barr moved so quickly. I did not think that the collusion aspect of this letter was going to be revelatory, but I did think that the obstruction one possibly would be. And it shuts it down definitively. There is a piece of the letter that we haven’t talked about, which is that Bill Barr, the attorney general, tells Congress that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, recognized that, quote, “the evidence does not establish that the president was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference. And that while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the president’s intent with respect to obstruction.” So a big piece of the thinking for Barr seems to have been that since there is not an underlying crime that was found related to the president, that obstruction is harder to prove.

michael barbaro

In other words, there is a connection between these two questions. Between coordination and obstruction of justice. That if there was no coordination, if there is no original sin, then it’s hard to establish that there was obstruction of justice.

maggie haberman

Right. If there is no crime that was committed, it is hard to suggest that the president was trying to obstruct justice in the course of pursuing evidence about that crime. And that is an argument that Mike and I also heard the president’s lawyers say repeatedly, which was that there couldn’t be obstruction of justice because there’s nothing to obstruct.

michael barbaro

Does that seem like universally sound legal logic? That you can’t commit a crime in obstructing investigations into something that wasn’t a crime? Because it certainly feels like if someone’s investigating me, and I decide to stop the investigation in violation of the law, that that could be itself a violation of a law, separate and apart from whether or not what I was being investigated for in the first place was a crime? I mean, are those two things necessarily connected?

michael schmidt

I think there’s two reasons why the Justice Department would not want to bring a case like this. The first is that if there’s not an underlying crime, then do you really want to bring an obstruction case? Do you really want to go to court to try and convince a jury that someone took actions where there was nothing to cover up? I think that’s a tough case to make. The second thing is that while the president huffed and puffed a lot about this investigation, I’m not sure how much real damage it did to it. Bob Mueller was able to pursue his inquiry. He was not fired. They finished what they had. They weren’t impeded by the Justice Department. So what was the real damage? If the president was obstructing, how did he really hurt the investigation? Give me the damage report. And I don’t think at the end of the day there was that much that actually hurt Mueller’s team’s ability to do their job. It may have been loud, it may have been annoying, it may have been dispiriting. But I think they were able to pursue what they needed to.

maggie haberman

I think, also, there’s a third point, which is that I think that Bob Mueller was very mindful that he was dealing with the presidency and the damage that an ongoing case like this, if it was iffy, and not locked solid, not completely nailed down, could cause not just the office of the presidency, but the kind of trauma that brings to a country.

michael barbaro

I’m very struck as we’re talking, Maggie and Mike, that, at least according to this letter, this is exactly what we have had in front of us all along.

maggie haberman

Unless the report has a lot of information that we’re not seeing, what we saw play out publicly is what was there. The attorney general made clear that this investigation was ending without a recommendation of more indictments. That includes sealed indictments. This is what we’re getting. It will now move to Capitol Hill, and Democrats will seek to get as much material as they can. But in terms of the part the president was really concerned about in terms of Mueller, that is over.

michael barbaro

So let’s talk about what Congress is going to do now. Congressional leaders have just received this letter. Mike, you have told us in the past that Democrats were going to be very cautious in how they proceeded under any circumstances. And that if Mueller didn’t find the sort of thing that would force even Republicans in Congress to acknowledge that the president had violated the law, impeachment proceedings would be very unlikely. And it seems like this letter is not at all what Democrats would have needed to move forward in that sort of way.

michael schmidt

I think it takes a lot of wind out of their sails. They basically have full-blown investigations into obstruction and collusion going on. And here, you have Mueller, someone who has far better tools than they will ever have to investigate, coming out and clearing the president on the Russia issue and giving a mixed message on obstruction that allows Barr to clear him there. It gives the Republicans a very good argument to say, why are you guys continuing to look at these issues? Why are you continuing to rummage around in the president’s life when we’ve received clarity on this from the Justice Department? So I think it hurts them.

maggie haberman

I think that you’re going to see Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, proceed carefully. As of late evening Sunday, she still had not said anything about how she was going to handle this. And I think that you are going to see a lot of Republicans reminding Democrats that they were holding Robert Mueller up as this avatar of credibility when the investigation was going on, so that it is hard to now say, we need to know more, because we need to make a determination that he couldn’t. That will almost inevitably look very political.

michael schmidt

So the Democrats are going to ask for everything that Mueller had in the report. And it’s clear from the letter that a lot of obstruction of justice issues were looked at and detailed and analyzed. And the question is that if the Democrats get their hands on that, how damaging is the obstruction stuff? And is it strong enough to give Democrats more of an oomph on their obstruction investigation?

michael barbaro

Is it both of your understandings that Congress will get a full copy of the Mueller report that they can then examine for these answers?

maggie haberman

I don’t think that’s been resolved yet.

michael schmidt

That’s the big question.

michael barbaro

Maggie, after months of the president calling the Mueller investigation a witch hunt or worse, would it be better now for him to lean into that description or turn around and say, you know, this investigation is the gold star of investigations, and it says I’m in the clear?

maggie haberman

There are a lot of people in the White House who are encouraging the president to turn and say, this was a highly respected prosecutor who just said there was no collusion. And I hope we can all accept this and move on, and try to strike a healing note. It is the president’s political instinct to burrow into his base and say, this was a witch hunt, this was a hoax. And that is what I have heard a number of his advisers say publicly in the last few hours. It’s what his son said in a statement that he gave me. I think they are going to go full-on by telling people this was a waste of two years. This was an effort to undo an electoral result in 2016, and don’t let this happen again.

michael barbaro

And I wonder if you can explain for listeners why it wasn’t what you just said the president might call it — a waste of two years. A waste of everyone’s time and an effort to politically undermine him.

maggie haberman

It might have had the effect of undermining him. That might have been one of the impacts. But we do know, based on numerous assessments from the intelligence community, that Russians did seek to interfere in the 2016 election. We do know that there were many contacts between Russians and people involved in the Trump campaign. So trying to find out what was at the heart of that, one would think, was not a waste of time. And now there is an answer. There is a world in which the president could say, this gave me a clean bill of health, and now you can trust me going forward.

michael barbaro

Mike, I want to ask you the same question. What is your explanation for why this investigation was not a waste of time?

michael schmidt

Well, there were legitimate issues and questions that had to be answered. And along the way, the president took action after action that only made the perception that he did something wrong worse. He fired the F.B.I. director. He asked the F.B.I. director to end an investigation into whether his former national security adviser was talking improperly to the Russian ambassador. He said things publicly about the investigation time and time again to demonize the investigators. He criticized his own attorney general, who recused himself from the Russia investigation. He called Mueller’s team a bunch of angry Democrats. He made the perception worse. And there were things that he did that walked up to the line of obstruction and had to be looked at, that had to be sorted through. Whether it was to clear the president and say, hey, look, he did nothing wrong, for his sake, or to give the public some confidence that the president of the United States was not a Russian agent.

michael barbaro

So among the questions that had to be answered in an investigation into Russian interference in our election, regardless of the answer, was what was the president’s role in this? And it happens to be that the answer was seemingly nothing illegal. But that answer had to be unearthed.

michael schmidt

A significant portion of the country thought that the president of the United States either wittingly or unwittingly had worked with a foreign adversary to influence the election. That was something that had to be looked into.

michael barbaro

And because he didn’t do that, Bill Barr also believes he did not obstruct this investigation.

michael schmidt

There was nothing to obstruct.

maggie haberman

At least that’s what they found.

michael barbaro

No one asked me, but —

maggie haberman

Michael, what do you think?

michael barbaro

I think that Russia could never have fathomed just how cosmically disruptive their efforts to influence the election would be.

maggie haberman

I think they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, yes.

michael schmidt

Look at how distracted we’ve been as a country because of this for the past two years. Think about all the other issues that we could have been talking about or looking at. This was an enormous, enormous distraction for the country.

maggie haberman

And for Donald Trump.

michael barbaro

Maggie, Mike, thank you very much.

maggie haberman

Thank you.

michael schmidt

Thanks for having us.

archived recording (donald trump) So after a long look, after a long investigation, after so many people have been so badly hurt, after not looking at the other side, where a lot of bad things happened, a lot of horrible things happened, a lot of very bad things happened for our country, it was just announced there was no collusion with Russia. The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard —

michael barbaro

On Sunday afternoon, on his way back to Washington from his home in Florida, President Trump addressed the major findings of the Mueller report.

archived recording (donald trump) There was no obstruction, and none whatsoever. And it was a complete and total exoneration. It’s a shame that our country had to go through this. To be honest, it’s a shame that your president has had to go through this for — before I even got elected, it began. And it began illegally. And hopefully, somebody is going to look at the other side. This was an illegal takedown that failed. And hopefully, somebody is going to be looking at the other side. So it’s complete —

michael barbaro

Not long after, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Jerry Nadler of New York, disputed the president’s characterization of the Mueller report during a news conference in New York.

archived recording (jerry nadler) Earlier today, I received a four-page letter from Attorney General Barr outlining his summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report while making a few questionable legal arguments of his own. I take from this letter three points. First, President Trump is wrong. This report does not amount to a so-called “total exoneration.”

michael barbaro

Nadler seemed to accept Mueller’s conclusion that the president did not coordinate with Russia, but seized on less definitive statements made by Mueller and Barr about whether the president obstructed justice.

archived recording (jerry nadler) The attorney general’s comments make it clear that Congress must step in to get the truth and provide full transparency to the American people. The president has not been exonerated by the special counsel. Yet the attorney general has decided not to go further or, apparently, to share those findings with the public. We cannot simply rely on what may be a hasty partisan interpretation of the facts.

michael barbaro