The 89th and 90th congressional hearings in his lifetime of Public Service and likely his last. By the end of the day he said everything the democrats were trying to prove. Its not a witch hunt. It was not a hoax. He could not clear the president. And the russians are interfering in our election process right now. But declarative sentences were hard to find. He fouled off close to 200 questions with either no answer or a deflection. And the issue everyone has been dancing around all day, hes older now. Two weeks shy of 75. And while a presence still, not the commanding presence that so many remembered and had hoped for. There was a new and somewhat arresting frailty to him. At times words failed him. The tempo outpaced him. Page numbers and citations eluded him. For his part the president immediately declared victory, called it all a witch hunt and a hoax. Intelligence Committee Chairman adam schiff totaled it all up from today. Russia interfered in our election to help trump. Russians made numerous contacts with the campaign. The Campaign Welcomed their help. No one reported these contacts or interference to the fbi. They lied to cover it up. That was the quote. That was the summation after a protracted presentation. Mueller started the day in front of house judiciary, where he was asked about trumps claims of exoneration and his possible legal exposure once he leaves office. The president has repeatedly claimed that your report found there was no obstruction and that it completely and totally exonerated him. But that is not what your report said, is it . Correct. It is not what the report said. So the report did not conclude that he did not commit obstruction of justice. Is that correct . That is correct. Was there sufficient evidence to convict President Trump or anyone else with obstruction of justice . We did not make that calculation. How could you not have made the calculation because the olc opinion, office of legal counsel, indicates that we cannot indict a sitting president. Could you charge the president with a crime after he left office . Yes. You believe that he committed you could charge the president of the United States with obstruction of justice after he left office . Yes. Mueller continued his testimony before the intelligence committee, where the focus was his findings about russias efforts to meddle in our 2016 president ial election. As that hearing got under way the chairman made a point of refuting trumps attacks on mueller and his conclusions. When donald trump called your investigation a witch hunt, that was also false, was it not . Id like to think so. Yes. Well, your investigation is not a witch hunt, is it . It is not a witch hunt. When the president said the russian interference was a hoax, that was false, wasnt it . True. During his exchanges with lawmakers, mueller repeated his warnings about russias ongoing attempts to interfere with american democracy. He also suggested the fbi is still in the business of a counterintelligence investigation. Is this in your investigation did you think this was a single attempt by the russians to get involved in our election or did you find evidence to suggest theyll try to do this again . It wasnt a single attempt. Theyre doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign. Since it was outside the purview of your investigation, your report did not address how flynns false statements could pose a National Security risk because the russians knew the falsity of those statements, right . I cannot get into that mainly because there are many elements of the fbi that are looking at different aspects of that issue. Currently . Currently. Thank you. You may recall mueller never had a sitdown interview with the president during his entire investigation. Instead he accepted written responses from the president. This afternoon mueller was finally asked why that was. Why didnt you subpoena the president . We were almost toward the end of our investigation, and wed had little success in pushing to get the interview of the president. We decided that we did not want to exercise the subpoena powers because of the necessity of expediting the end of the investigation. Did you have sufficient evidence of the president s intent to obstruct justice, and is that why you didnt do the interview . The reason we didnt do the interview is because of the length of time that it would take to resolve the issues attendant to that. In both hearings today democrats took pains to try to make muellers report real for the public, employing visual quote displays to back up their questions. Susan glasser filed a rather devastating review of the day for the new yorker tonight where she writes, those who bothered to read all 448 pages discovered a gripping document, painstakingly footnoted and verified. It is a portrait of a white house dysfunction and lies unlike any weve seen. None of this was mentioned at wednesdays hearing. With that lets bring in our leadoff guest for a wednesday night. Frank figliuzzi, former fbi assistant director for counterintelligence. Former u. S. Attorney joyce vance, who spent 25 years as a federal prosecutor. Jeremy bash, former chief of staff at cia and pentagon. Former chief counsel for the house intel committee. And josh gerstein, Senior Legal Affairs contributor for politico. Jeremy bash, given your experience with this very committee, id like to begin with you. Last night here we werent alone on this broadcast in billing this as perhaps the most consequential day of testimony in recent years. In your view what was today really . Well, theres one unassailable truth, which is that donald trump engaged in a massive coverup to hide the fact that his campaign knowingly received support from the russian federation. Just that one sentence, brian, as powerful, as alarming, as arresting as it was, never came out of the mouth of the key witness, bob mueller, today. Instead he gave one word, staccato, sometimes monosyllabic answers. He wanted to be anywhere on earth besides that witness chair. I respect that. He doesnt want to be a political prop. He doesnt like talking to politicians. He always hated going up to capitol hill to testify. But i think it was a huge missed opportunity to educate the public about the vast enormous stakes that he actually found in his report, and none of the powerful points in his report really came through today. Joyce vance, because these are human beings were talking about, i found myself thinking about his family and friends watching today and wondering what they made of it. This turns to what you made of it. Do you think he did his own work justice . You know, this was a difficult day for a number of reasons, and mueller was careful to state at the outset that he was there as a prosecutor. And i think by that he meant he had to operate under the ethical and practical constraints that prosecutors operate under. If there was a disconnect in todays hearing, it was really the larger failure to explain to the public what that meant and why it was reasonable. So many people will feel like mueller could have done much more today, perhaps should have done much more. I think we would have all liked to have seen greater explanation. But at the end of the day mueller finished where he started, with a, as you point out, wellwritten, welldocumented, very specific report thats available to the public. It did not come alive today. This was not razzledazzle. This was not the movie version of the book. So Frank Figliuzzi, it was probably known to you that rumors were circulating the last six months about some sort of perhaps agerelated organic diminishment on the part of mr. Mueller, and now begins the press coverage to kind of backfill that and explain what we saw or didnt see today. I quote to you from the New York Times tonight. Soon after the special counsels Office Opened in 2017, some aides noticed that Robert Mueller kept noticeably shorter hours than he had as fbi director when he showed up at the bureau daily at 6 00 a. M. , often worked nights. He seemed to cede substantial responsibility to his top deputies, including aaron zebley, who managed dateday operations. As negotiations with President Trumps lawyers about interviewing him dragged on, for example, mr. Mueller took part less and less. Is that, frank, what you think we saw today . Well, we didnt see the man that i served as fbi director. But we saw a man who is approaching age 75 in a couple of weeks. The question we have to ask ourselves is so what . What is the impact of that age factory if any . And my response to that is this. We are living in a society that likes drama and noise and elevated voices. And seemingly over facts and findings. So muellers facts and findings would not be any different. The teams findings would not be any different if he were 62 or 52 or 75. Thats the reality. But sadly, people who tune in to tv expect to see entertainment and drama and not facts and findings. We saw a stark contrast today between a professional prosecutor and professional politicians. And now we have a choice to make. Are we going to choose the facts or are we going to choose the drama . And i dont think any of that would have changed depending on the age of the prosecutor. Josh, another way of putting some of this is the Mueller Report came out not attuned to the age of the internet. Todays televised hearing was not quite attuned to the age of television. Did muellers refusal to declare that the president was exonerated, for example, get lost in the word salad over exoneration . A little bit. We also heard a monosyllabic answer to a question that was put to him and later he came around to it again and said Something Like the president was not exculpated which people like me who spend a lot of time in courtrooms are used to hearing that kind of language but thats not the kind of clarion call clarity that i think people were hoping for from this hearing. And im struck, brian, that this is really the third time democrats have fallen into this trap of regarding mueller as sort of a messiah figure who was going to provide some sort of unifying, overarching indictment of, you know, numerous people across the Trump Campaign and the Trump White House for their actions in the 2016 campaign. That didnt happen. Then the report came out and it didnt really have the coup de grace against the president that would inexorably lead to impeachment. A lot of damaging information but no direct accusations of a crime. And then this hearing was sort of ginned up by the house members, the Democratic House members, who thought, well, this will be it. Well be able to get mueller on the record here and that will really cause many people in the American Public to get the message and, again, a bit of a letdown today. So i think there has to be some disappointment in the democratic ranks on the hill tonight. So josh, thats interesting. They might have put too many hopes and dreams in lieu of a work product into Robert Mueller. Any talk that jerry nadler isnt perhaps up to the job . I dont think so. I mean, i dont think its simply nadler, although i think if youre intimating, brian, that the intelligence hearing was more revealing and it seemed that mueller was more on his game there, the questions were i think more pointed and there were more direct response. You had the chairman there, adam schiff, engage in a direct sort of repartee with mueller that i thought was pretty interesting and pretty damning of the president , even in the context of these oneword answers. And we also learned today that the hill committees were told in advance that mueller would not read parts of his report as people had hoped earlier. So they really came into this knowing that they were likely to get pretty thin gruel from mueller, and i think unfortunately for them thats what was served up. So jeremy bash, another case of expectations being too high, and it proved nothing against the Outgoing Energy of the president. Yeah. And i just want to go back to this point that frank and others raised, which is you know, we live in an era of raised voices. Actually, i dont think it would have required raised voices. I dont think it would have required hyperbole, drama, razzledazzle. I actually think all bob mueller had to do was explain in his own kind of just the facts, maam presentation, hey, the president engaged in obstruction of justice by doing these things. The president engaged in this wrongful conduct, and heres the evidence. If hed only just put, you know, subject, verb, object together, i think it would have been a very compelling argument. But basically, he said i dont want to discuss this. And i think what came through was sort of a lack of confidence in the substance of his report, which is really a shame because unfortunately i think the conclusion people will draw is that, well, theres less of a case here to go forward with accountability for the president. And i talked to two members of congress tonight who said already in the Democratic Caucus up on capitol hill theres less momentum for impeachment tonight than there was before these hearings. And Frank Figliuzzi, thats a fair question. What else didnt you hear today that perhaps you wanted to . Oh, i think it would have been very compelling if mueller had actually said, look, if donald j. Trump was not the president of the United States i would be referring him for criminal charges. I think that would have made quite a difference. But ive got say, look, were in a place right now where people see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear. Simon garfunkel wrote a song called the boxer. It has lyrics saying a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. So i wonder whether anything mueller could have said today would have changed people who are solidly entrenched in their opinion right now. Joyce vance, i want to read you something from tom nichols of the naval war college. Well put it on the screen. Hes been a frequent guest on this show. Lets call him a lapsed republican. Schiffs five minutes and muellers answers would have been enough for republicans to impeach and convict any other president before sundown today. And indeed 12 minutes prior to him tweeting that here is a bit of the schiffmueller exchange. Well talk about it on the other side. During the course of this russian interference in the election the russians made outreach to the Trump Campaign, did they not . That occurred over the course of yeah. That occurred. In fact, the Campaign Welcomed the russian hem, did they not . I think we have in the report indications that that occurred. Yes. The president himself called on the russians to hack hillarys emails . There was a statement by the president in those general lines. So joyce, that gets us closer to complete sentences. To jeremys point, does tom nichols have a point . If youd inserted the name barack obama for donald trump in that questioning, theres no doubt that impeachment proceedings would have commenced immediately at the conclusion of those answers. It remains an incomprehensible feature of this presidency that there is nothing that trump can do that will seemingly dissuade his followers from going there. The notion that the Republican Party is willing to turn a blind eye to complicity if not conspiracy in russian activity designed to attack our election is really i think one of the mysteries that historians and political scientists will look back on for this couple of years. And just wonder and parse how it could have ever happened so quickly. Hey, jeremy bash, just one more thing before we have to hit a break. If anyone wants drama or a bold stroke, you know, the speaker can cancel the entire summer recess and declare were going to go all in here and were going to draw up articles of impeachment and start an inquiry. Thats one way to go, i suppose. I suppose. Although theres also another avenue, and tonight the house took a vote in which they allowed Committee Subpoenas to become actual subpoenas of the full house, which gives them more force in the courts of law because the Trump Administration had been pushing back saying these are merely Committee Subpoenas. So i think the democrats are going to get more aggressive on oversight. I just dont know that i see them getting more aggressive on impeachment. All right. With that, our thanks tonight after a long day to Frank Figliuzzi, to joyce vance, jeremy bash, josh gerstein. Really appreciate it, gang, very much. Coming up, we will talk with a democrat from california who got mueller to deny one of the president s regular complaints about the russia investigation. And later, republicans were claiming vindication before the hearings ended. Democrats argue theyve yet to make their strongest case. When it comes to impeachment, well try to sort it out as the 11th hours just Getting Started on this wednesday night. Here, it all starts with a simple. Hello hi how can i help . A data plan for everyone. Everyone . Everyone. Lets send to everyone [ camera clicking ] wifi up there . Ahhh. Sure, why not . Howd he get out . a camera might figure it out. That was easy glad i could help. At xfinity, were here to make life simple. Easy. Awesome. So come ask, shop, discover at your xfinity store today. Would you agree that it was not a hoax that the russians were engaged in trying to impact our election . Absolutely. Its not a hoax. The indictments we returned against the russians, two different ones, were substantial in their scope, using the scope word again. And i think one of the we have underplayed to a certain extent that aspect of our investigation that has and would have longterm damage to the United States, that we need to move quickly to address. Robert mueller was deemed to be at his strongest today when the subject went right there, Russian Election interference. He stressed the need to protect future elections. The New York Times pointed out