Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham floated an invitation for a top prosecutor in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team who has criticized the Russia investigation.
The South Carolina Republican brought up Andrew Weissmann, who was known as Mueller’s “pit bull,” in the middle of a hearing Wednesday with former FBI Director James Comey.
After noting that Mueller had declined his invitation to testify, Graham delivered a general invitation to committee members in the room to request Weissmann as a witness.
“If you want Mr. Weissmann to come, I would invite him,” he said.
The hearing Wednesday is the latest in the judiciary panel’s inquiry into Crossfire Hurricane, the code name for the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, which was later wrapped into Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Graham stressed that not one member of President Trump’s team was “charged with colluding with the Russians” as part of the special counsel inquiry that ended in the spring of 2019.
Mueller released a rare statement on Tuesday to defend the Russia investigation as Weissmann has gone around in a media blitz to promote his new book and said the special counsel investigation “absolutely” let people down. In particular, he said Mueller’s team erred in choosing not to subpoena Trump to testify and not reaching a decision on whether Trump obstructed justice.
Mueller, a 76-year-old former FBI director, stood by the special counsel team’s work. “It is not surprising that members of the Special Counsel’s Office did not always agree, but it is disappointing to hear criticism of our team based on incomplete information,” he wrote in part.
Weissmann, now an MSNBC analyst, is being scrutinized for wiping data from two government-issued phones while on the Mueller team. Notes from March 3, 2018, said that he “entered password too many times and wiped his phone,” and notes on Sept. 27, 2018, indicated that he “accidentally wiped cell phone — data lost.”
“I know I didn’t, and I’m confident that my colleagues didn’t either,” Weissmann said when asked by MSNBC host Ari Melber whether he did anything improper with his phone while on the Mueller team.
William Barnett, the FBI agent who handled the Flynn case in 2016 and 2017, was interviewed by the DOJ earlier this month and revealed that he doubted that retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn had committed any crimes. He also said that he and others did not dismiss the possibility of Trump-Russia collusion and that he thought certain FBI investigators as well as special counsel’s office prosecutors such as Weissmann were single-minded as well as overly aggressive in their tactics in going after people in Trump’s orbit, including Flynn.
“Barnett thought there was a ‘get Trump’ attitude by some at the SCO,” the FBI wrote this month.
Mueller’s 2019 report said that Russians interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” but the special counsel’s team “did not establish” criminal conspiracy between Russians and anyone in Trump’s circle.
