Mark Meadows: Democrats 'privately orchestrating' Mueller hearing to be 2020 campaign event

“Democrats privately orchestrating the Mueller hearing this week to be a 2020 campaign event for the left,” the North Carolina Republican said. “This isn’t about transparency. If it was, we’d be talking about the evidence of blatant FISA abuse, warrantless secret recordings, and declassifying documents.”

Mueller, who agreed to testify only after he was subpoenaed, will appear before House Judiciary for three hours and the Intelligence Committee for two hours on Wednesday, facing questions from both Democrats and Republicans. The hearings are meant to focus on Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, suggested there is a back channel Democrats have with Mueller to work out “a few little sound bites” that they could use to their advantage and warned that he expects “the worst” because just one phrase from Mueller could be used to fuel a push for impeaching Trump.

Democrats have been huddling to discuss how to proceed with Mueller’s hearing, considering the former FBI director himself said he would only speak about the unredacted contents of his report.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler said Democrats hope to get Mueller to divulge information that does not appear in his report.

“We will ask questions designed to elicit the information, designed to get the information out that we want, designed to show what his report found that is at odds with what the administration and the attorney general have been saying,” Nadler told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes last week. “As I said, to show that the 10 instances of obstruction of justice by the president, to show the repeated times where the president instructs people to lie to the American people or to Congress.”

Hayes suggested this means Democrats simply want Mueller to recite the findings of his 448-page report in front of a live audience. Nadler said Democrats will try to pry a little more information out of him.

“To a large extent. Hopefully we go a little further, but yes,” Nadler said. But he acknowledged it is not a full-proof strategy. Nadler said, “I don’t know,” when asked if he thinks he can get Mueller to tread beyond the “four corners” of the report.

“But the key is to get this, there has been — from before the report was released, when [Attorney General William] Barr gave that bogus summary of the report, there has been a deliberate campaign of lying and disinformation, as to what’s in the report,” Nadler added. “And it’s of supreme importance that people understand what we’re dealing with, and we can go on from there. I think it changes the ground that we’re standing on.”

Nadler said he and fellow Democrats are planning to pool their time together on the questioning. “Very much so,” he said when asked if that’s the plan.

Republicans have plans for their line of question. For instance, Nunes, who called Mueller’s investigation an “obstruction of justice trap” that began without evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, said Andrew Weissmann, who was known as Mueller’s “pitbull,” will be the subject of multiple lines of inquiry.

Mueller’s report, released by the Justice Department with redactions in April, concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election but did not establish that any members of the Trump campaign criminally conspired with the Russians in these efforts. Mueller did not reach a conclusion on obstruction of justice, but Barr and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded there was insufficient evidence for such a crime in the summary the Justice Department released preceding the report.

Trump and his allies have seized on Barr’s summary of the principal findings of the report to say he was vindicated.