White House Watch: Mueller, Indictment, and the Dossier (UPDATED)

Is Robert Mueller in danger of getting the boot? The special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 elections has been in the sights of allies of Donald Trump for a while. And on Friday, Fox News reported on a “fresh round of calls from conservative critics for his resignation” even before it was revealed Mueller’s investigation had sealed its first indictment.

For what it’s worth, I’m told there’s been no talk at the Justice Department of getting rid of Mueller. The burden of doing so would fall to the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller in the first place back in May. But the power of firing Mueller would ultimately lie with President Trump. Could an embarrassing indictment—or worse—prompt Trump to dump Mueller? And if he did so, what sort of pushback would he get from Republicans in Congress?

Back in July, House speaker Paul Ryan dismissed concerns that Mueller was part of a witch hunt against Trump. “Remember, Bob Mueller is a Republican who was appointed by a Republican, who served in the Republican administration and crossed over, I mean, and stayed on until his term ended. But—I don’t think many people are saying Bob Mueller is a person who is a biased partisan. He’s really sort of anything but,” Ryan said. “The point is, we have an investigation in the House, an investigation in the Senate, and a special counsel who sort of depoliticizes this stuff and gets it out of the political sphere, and that is, I think, better, to get this off to the side, I think the facts will vindicate themselves and then let’s just go do our job.”

I asked Ryan’s office if the Republican speaker still felt this way, given that other Republicans, including members of his conference, were calling on Mueller to resign. “The speaker has addressed this issue multiple times. I wouldn’t have an update from those comments,” said Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong.

But back to the case against Mueller. The argument that he is unfit to serve as special counsel is two-fold:

(1) It was reported by the Washington Post last week that a file of unsubstantiated opposition research (known as the “dossier”) on candidate Trump, compiled by the firm Fusion GPS, was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign apparently found the contents of the dossier not credible enough to campaign on, though the report somehow found its way into several newsrooms in the run-up to the election. When the contents were finally published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, they revealed an error-ridden report containing lots of salacious and dubious claims about the incoming president.

But the FBI, under the directorship of James Comey, apparently saw enough in the dossier to raise suspicion. The Bureau used information gleaned from this file to further investigate connections between Trump’s campaign and Russian interests, including employing domestic surveillance. That investigation is what morphed into the special counsel investigation. Mueller, a former FBI director, is personally close with Comey.

“The federal code could not be clearer—Mueller is compromised by his apparent conflict of interest in being close with James Comey,” Arizona congressman Trent Franks told Fox. (It’s unclear what, as a legal matter, “being close” with Comey means.)

The Wall Street Journal makes a more sophisticated stab at this line of argument in a recent editorial. “The Fusion news means the FBI’s role in Russia’s election interference must now be investigated—even as the FBI and Justice insist that Mr. Mueller’s probe prevents them from cooperating with Congressional investigators,” the editors at the Journal write. “Mr. Mueller is a former FBI director, and for years he worked closely with Mr. Comey. It is no slur against Mr. Mueller’s integrity to say that he lacks the critical distance to conduct a credible probe of the bureau he ran for a dozen years. He could best serve the country by resigning to prevent further political turmoil over that conflict of interest.”

The conclusion the Journal and others are making is that the FBI’s investigation into Trump associates is disqualified because of the partisan origin of the research. The corollary being that the FBI was politically motivated to investigate Trumpworld. This view could, in theory, turn out to be true. But as of now it is an assertion of facts not in evidence.

(2) Here’s the other argument against Mueller: A separate case involving a Russian energy concern’s uranium mining deal from 2010 that was approved by the Obama administration’s State Department has received renewed interest since the initial reports back in 2015. Hillary Clinton was the secretary of State when the deal received approval—around which the Russian company, Rosatom, was paying both the Clinton Foundation and Hillary’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, for speaking engagements. The FBI apparently considered and declined to recommend bribery charges in 2010. The Bureau’s director at the time? Bob Mueller.

But without the full details of the uranium case, it’s impossible to know whether the FBI’s lack of recommendation was proper or not. Once again, the implication is that Mueller is compromised politically by having declined to recommend charges against the Obama administration.

Again, it’s certainly possible that Mueller, despite being a Republican with a long history of fair-play and judiciousness and who had never before been accused of partisan hackery, suddenly went into the tank for Clinton and Obama. That’s one interpretation of the facts. The other interpretation is that Mueller is an exceedingly careful investigator and prosecutor who has always been reluctant to go farther than he can be fully supported by the evidence.

The President’s Schedule—According to the White House, President Trump will meet on Monday with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in the morning and Defense Secretary James Mattis in the afternoon. In between, he’ll have his semi-regular lunch with Vice President Mike Pence and an additional guest—Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose recusal from the Russia investigation led, in the president’s own estimation, to the creation of the special counsel.

With the news breaking Friday about Mueller’s first indictment, Democrats have taken a sober tone on the Mueller investigation even as they start to sharpen their knives.

Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, said on ABC’s This Week he could neither confirm nor deny whether President Trump was under investigation. But he speculated that one of two former Trump aides, Paul Manafort or Michael Flynn, was likely to be indicted this week.

“If it is Paul Manafort, and he has apparently told others that he expects to be indicted, it may help us answer one very central question in the investigation,” Schiff told George Stephanopoulos. “We know that the Russian government, through intermediaries, was reaching out to the Trump campaign, reaching out to Paul Manafort and others, and offering information on Hillary Clinton they thought would help the Trump campaign, and that the campaign was willing and accepted that idea.”

“The question,” he added, “is who gave what to whom as a result of these overtures.”

Schiff also suggested that they would continue to investigate the controversial dossier.

“The most significant thing to me is that Christopher Steele may have found out even before our intelligence agencies that the Russians were, in fact, aiming to help Donald Trump in the election,” Schiff said. “So that central conclusion has been borne out. Now, the question we continue to investigate is, was the campaign coordinating in the Russian help? And that still remains to be seen.”

Republicans, meanwhile, are bracing for an upheaval, stressing that little is known yet about Mueller’s findings.

“We don’t know who the person is. We don’t know what the charges are,” New Jersey governor Chris Christie told Stephanopoulos Sunday. “We don’t know anything except there’s a report that someone says there will be charges on Monday and that there is a sealed indictment. And so once that happens, we’ll have a lot more to react to.”

Christie did not echo the calls for Mueller to resign, but did say the special counsel “has to be very, very careful about making sure that the public believes that he has no conflicts and that his integrity is unquestioned.”

One notable exception to the Republican Mueller skepticism is House Oversight Committee chairman Trey Gowdy, who told Fox News’s Chris Wallace he did not support any effort to end the Mueller investigation.

“I readily concede I’m in an increasingly small group of Republicans. I think Bob Mueller has a really distinguished career of service to our country,” Gowdy said. “I would encourage my Republican friends—give the guy a chance to do his job. The result will be known by the facts, by what he uncovers.”

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