Veteran journalist Bob Woodward predicted Democrats will be disappointed if they pursue a “redo” of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether President Trump’s campaign conspired with the Russians and possible obstruction of justice.
A day after Mueller delivered a public statement about his work, Woodward said it was “very, very unusual” that the special counsel did not elaborate on his work or take questions. He theorized this signifies that the findings in his report are truly exhaustive.
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“I think the key here will pivot on the quality of evidence he has. He’s laid out an obstruction case. A lot of prosecutors have said you could bring some charges against the president if he were not the president based on that evidence. But overall, and again, I hate to go back to Watergate, but you had those thousands of hours of tape records where you heard the president say, ‘let’s obstruct justice. Let’s pay blackmail money. Let’s lie. Let’s stonewall the grand jury.’ And so that raised the bar on how you deal with the president. And at this point we do not have that kind of evidence involving Trump,” the Washington Post associate editor of Watergate fame said on MSNBC on Thursday.
As rank-and-file Democrats and 2020 candidates for president clamor for impeachment proceedings, Woodward speculated that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been resistant to those calls, knows there is a “weakness” in the evidence.
“If the House Democrats are going to have a redo of the Mueller investigation, call the witnesses, get the documents, and so forth, I think they’re not going to be very happy because Mueller did a pretty good job finding out as best they could what occurred. And so you could spend months on that redo and come up with not much new in terms of hard evidence. I think — I do not know this,” Woodward said.
“I’ve not asked Speaker Pelosi this. But I think she realizes the weakness of the evidence,” he added. “And if they had tape recordings, if they had documents, if it was very clear, not ambiguous, not mushy, that the president committed obstruction of justice as a lot of people theorized when Mueller was investigating, that there was some secret conversation between Trump and Putin or Trump people and Russians and so forth. That has not been discovered. Should it surface, should it exist, I think Nancy Pelosi will do a 180 on this issue. She has a good political sniffer here and she realizes you do not have the kind of evidence that surfaced in the Nixon case or even in the Clinton case. And of course that didn’t lead to conviction and removal of President Clinton.”
Mueller was unable to establish criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. He also did not determine whether Trump sought to obstruct justice, but did not clear the president either. Pointing to the 10 instances of possible obstruction by Trump outlined in Mueller’s report, Democrats argue he provided a road map for them to continue his investigation. They were further emboldened after Mueller’s address on Wednesday in which he said “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”
Woodward said he disagrees with Trump’s assertion that “the case is closed” and has attained vindication, but warned that a reexamination of Mueller’s work will “expend a lot of political energy and a lot of time” that could be better spent elsewhere.
“I think it is not going to be definitive in terms of defining the Trump presidency,” Woodward said. “But what is not closed and should not be closed is an examination of what Trump is doing as president. And I keep saying there is a governing crisis. And I have five top things I think we really need to look at: relations with China, what’s the policy? How has that gone down with North Korea, with Saudi Arabia? All the budget issues, and the tax issues, and immigration. That is really what’s going to have a direct impact on people’s lives. And if we’re going to sit around and say, ‘well, does this look like obstruction, or is this not obstruction?’ I think in a sense I know there are some in the White House who think, fine, let’s let Congress go after it and have this redo because [the] key point, as all of us have tried to make here: There was no evidence that there was a coordination or collusion between Russia and the Trump people or Trump. A lot of people expected that. Of course, if that was true, that would have been explosive. But based on what Mueller did, it is not true.”
