Rep. Eric Swalwell said special counsel Robert Mueller “played into” President Trump’s strategy to undermine the Russia investigation.
The California Democrat said Trump’s public attacks, calling the inquiry a “witch hunt” and complaining it was taking too long, influenced the way the former FBI director conducted his inquiry, leading to a disappointing result.
“There was no reason to have an arbitrary timeline,” Swalwell said during a Daily Beast podcast last week, referring to the special counsel’s reluctance to subpoena the president to answer questions in-person and risk drawing the investigation into a protracted legal fight.
Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, drew a connection to what he learned during his panel’s own Russia investigation. He said he heard from Obama administration officials that “it was in their head” that then-candidate Trump was saying the 2016 election was going to be “rigged” and feared swift actions to crack down on foreign interference would play into his hands.
“It was just that the president kept saying it over and over that this is a witch hunt, it’s taking too long, and ultimately Mueller played into that just as the Obama administration,” Swalwell said. “They didn’t want to affirm what Trump was saying. Mueller didn’t want to affirm what Trump was saying and the outcome is Trump got his way and we lost.”
Swalwell also noted that Trump’s self-imposed “red lines,” his finances and his family, further hamstrung the Mueller team as they were “treading very carefully” around them.
Swalwell is the second Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee in as many weeks to candidly assess Mueller.
Chairman Adam Schiff said on a previous episode of the same podcast that Mueller’s halting testimony about his report was “quite surprising” and noted that the former FBI director “was not the man that I knew just in terms of his strength of presence.”
Schiff, another California Democrat, said Mueller’s “cardinal mistake” was not demanding an in-person interview with the president, instead agreeing to allow written answers to his team’s questions.
Mueller wrapped up his two-year investigation last spring. His team was unable to find a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but it did lay out 10 instances of possible obstruction of justice that Democrats seized on as a road map to impeachment.
The investigation did, however, lead to convictions and guilty pleas from Trump associates over charges unrelated to Russia collusion. Trump and many of his allies have long derided the inquiry as a “witch hunt,” and there is now an effort underway by the Justice Department to seek out any misconduct by the investigators.
Democrats fear the review, being led by U.S. Attorney John Durham, is a politically motivated inquisition to discredit the Mueller team’s work.
Swalwell called Mueller a “hero,” and while he said he would not suggest the former special counsel “is flawed in any way,” he couched that praise by asserting, “I just think this is what the president does. He projects and then he gets you to do something that you otherwise wouldn’t do because you don’t want him to be proved right.”
The congressman, who ran a brief campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination this cycle, also said Trump is projecting in the same way right now with the issue of mail-in balloting, “seeding the doubt about the fraud that could be out there.”
“My fear is that we win in November. However, it’s just a national hell between November and January because the president refuses to accept the result,” Swalwell said.
