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Trump Lashes Out After Mueller Agrees to Testify to Congress
WASHINGTON — President Trump lashed out at the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, on Wednesday, dredging up false accusations about the conduct of investigators after House Democrats announced that Mr. Mueller would testify publicly next month.
The president offered no evidence as he repeated earlier accusations that Mr. Mueller destroyed text messages between two former F.B.I. officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who worked on the Russia investigation. “They’re gone and that is illegal,” Mr. Trump said of the texts in an interview with Fox Business Network. “That’s a crime.”
Mr. Trump was referring to a December Justice Department inspector general report that noted 19,000 text messages were lost because of technical problems, not intentionally deleted by Mr. Mueller or anyone.
Thousands of messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page have been made public, many highly critical of the president. Both Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page were criticized in an inspector general report last year on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, but the inspector general also said that bias had not affected the F.B.I.’s decision-making process. Another inspector general report on aspects of the Russia inquiry is due in the coming weeks or months.
“It never ends,” Mr. Trump said about Democratic efforts to investigate his conduct. He repeated that Mr. Mueller’s report, released in April, found no collusion with the Russians, and he again offered a false assertion that the special counsel team cleared him of obstruction of justice. After reading the report and considering 10 possible instances in which Mr. Trump may have obstructed justice, Attorney General William P. Barr decided the president had not.
Mr. Mueller emphasized that Mr. Trump has not been cleared of obstruction crimes. “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mr. Mueller said in May in his only public remarks on the investigation.
While Mr. Mueller has resisted testifying before congressional oversight committees on the Russia inquiry, he was compelled by subpoenas to answer questions on July 17 in two back-to-back hearings before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.
In response to the news about Mr. Mueller’s upcoming appearances on Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump on Tuesday tweeted, “Presidential Harassment!”
Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, dismissed Mr. Mueller’s planned testimony as a redundancy.
“I’ve seen this movie several times and I know the ending, and it should now end,” he wrote in a text message on Wednesday.
Though Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr have said they had no problem with Mr. Mueller providing congressional testimony, the White House has blocked other former government officials from complying with similar subpoenas.
Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters Wednesday that he was confident he would get testimony from Mr. Mueller, even if the White House tried to step in.
“They can attempt to,” Mr. Nadler said. “I doubt they would succeed. Mr. Mueller is an honest man and understands that congressional subpoenas are not optional.”
Mr. Mueller has said any future comments about the investigation would not go beyond what was included in the 448-page report.
If Mr. Mueller’s testimony is not blocked, the stakes will be high for both Democrats and Republicans, as Mr. Mueller’s answers are sure to provide material for 2020 presidential campaigns.
Mr. Nadler said the president and attorney general have tried to distort the findings of the Mueller report. Even if Mr. Mueller sticks to the material in the report, Mr. Nadler said, correcting the public record on national television could have a “profound impact.”
Republicans will most likely question Mr. Mueller about the origins of the Russia inquiry, and whether federal officials spied on the Trump campaign. Mr. Barr has launched a separate review into the beginnings of the investigation, and Mr. Trump has given him wide authority to declassify intelligence secrets as part of the review.
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