Once upon a time, Donald Trump affirmed that special counsel Robert Mueller had acted "honorably" in conducting the investigation he led into Russia's attack on the nation's 2016 elections. That was in March, just one day after Trump Attorney General William Barr served up a four-page fairytale to Congress implying that Mueller’s final report found no collusion between Team Trump and Russia and unilaterally clearing Trump obstruction charges. Barr's representation of the report turned out to be a supremely misleading and distorted tale on multiple counts.
Following those heady days of yore, Barr's account quickly turned into the spam of legal analysis shortly after the report's redacted release, and Trump has since magically developed deep misgivings about the once-honorable Mueller testifying before Congress. As recently as last week Trump had left the recommendation about Mueller's testimony up to General Spinmeister, but in the last 24 hours Trump has started running scared.
Following the 448-page report, "Why would the Democrats in Congress now need Robert Mueller to testify," Trump tweeted Sunday. “Bob Mueller should not testify. No redos for the Dems!”
As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent points out, Trump should be welcoming Mueller's testimony given the fact that he's spent the past couple months claiming the report gave him total exoneration. In fact, what the report did was prove that Trump’s campaign attempted to collude with Russia, and that Trump himself obstructed justice.
But Trump is at least sharp enough to know that whatever concessions his congressional GOP enablers manage to wrest from Mueller, the bulk of his testimony will buttress the report's findings of Trump's extensive malfeasance, even if it wasn't criminally prosecutable for various reasons.
While roughly one-third of America will obsess over the former, the bulk of the nation’s citizenry will take in the latter data points. Additionally, Sargent notes, "If Mueller is asked why he declined to exonerate Trump on obstruction, he might somehow let it be known that he did, in fact, establish extensive evidence of criminality."
But whether Trump and/or Barr object to Mueller's testimony is likely beside the point. House Democrats are negotiating directly with Mueller now on finding a date, and Mueller's work as an agent of the Justice Department will soon come to a close, making him the master of his own fate.
As I noted Friday, nearly three-quarters of Americans believe Mueller conducted a fair investigation, which gives him an enormous amount of influence over public perception of both his report and its findings. Mueller almost surely won't be flashy during testimony, but his first-hand account of the findings in his report, and his misgivings about the way Barr handled it, could go a long way toward indelibly exposing Trump's injustices to the American people.