and co-author on amicus briefs challenging President Trump’s emoluments clause violations and his appointment of Matthew Whitaker as attorney general.If recent history is any guide, Robert Mueller’s much-anticipated Capitol Hill appearance on Wednesday will fizzle into a mix of political grandstanding by the questioners and frustratingly narrow answers from the star witness.
But that's only possible with the right format. The hearings are almost guaranteed to a waste of time if they stick to the format of disjointed five-minute rotating rounds of questions by elected members. This format has proved to be a failure in the high-profile hearings of the past two years. Time and again, just when a member starts to make headway with follow-up questions, time runs out.
The report was stunningly wrong, for instance, on the law of coordination in campaign finance law. The Department of Justice’s appointment letter assigned Mueller to investigate campaign “coordination.” His report stated that “ ‘coordination’ does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express.” However, Congress explicitly aimed to avoid such a permissive interpretation.
On the related facts, there are additional puzzles in the report’s omissions. Volume I, on the campaign and Russia, also surprisingly omits key facts that the Mueller team revealed elsewhere in prosecutorial documents, which when put in context make a case for. For example, the Mueller team's indictments of the Russian hackers showed a remarkable coincidence in dates between Trump campaign signals and Russian hacking and leaking efforts, often on the same day or even within hours.
Of course, Mueller is unlikely to reveal any information we didn't know before, but the hearing could play the valuable role of drawing connections, correcting errors and laying out their significance in the public record.Mueller is rightly a respected, revered public servant, which makes any aggressive questioning like a cross-examination along these lines risky and awkward.
In Watergate, when members of Congress had questions for some of the most high-profile witnesses, or when they knew that the questions would produce bombshells, they didn’t keep the airtime for themselves. They graciously and wisely assigned the questioning to the committee counsel, and gave them time to probe and follow-up.
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Source: RollingStone - 🏆 483. / 51 Read more »