President Trump may have thought that he was done with the Mueller investigation, but it is not yet done with him. A barrage of news that came out in the course of a few hours on Wednesday reinforced how much the Democratic House of Representatives—impeachment or no impeachment—will keep up its aggressive scrutiny of the President.
First, the House Judiciary Committee authorized a subpoena for the Mueller report, which has remained cloistered inside the Trump Justice Department since the special counsel, Robert Mueller, delivered it, two weeks ago. Later on Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee issued its own requests, for the President’s tax returns, which he has refused to make public, unlike every other President for the past forty years. The House Oversight Committee, meanwhile, turned up evidence that the White House may have overruled professional staff to grant security clearances to twenty-five Administration officials who would not have otherwise received them, including, the Washington Post reported, the Presidential son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
And then, late Wednesday, came news that was both unsurprising and extremely significant: some members of the Mueller team were dismayed by the attenuated characterization of their findings that Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, released two weeks ago. Barr’s four-page letter, sources told the Times, portrayed their four-hundred-page report as more exculpatory of the President than it actually is (a story later matched by the Post and NBC News). Team Mueller, it turned out, had prepared its own summaries of the allegations against Trump, assuming that the Attorney General would share them with the public and Congress, but Barr chose not to release them. Was this evidence of a political fix, a crafty act of preëmption by the Attorney General? Or was it a mere matter of making sure that secret information did not inadvertently become public, as the Justice Department suggested, in a statement on Thursday morning? However it shakes out, Congress’s Investigation Wednesday was a reminder that Trump’s best news cycle about the Mueller report has long since come and gone.
“A bunch of sneaky, unethical leakers,” Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani said, on Fox News, about Mueller’s staff soon after the news stories broke. The gloating-Trump phase of the Mueller investigation was clearly over. Giuliani abandoned the unconvincing praise for the special counsel’s team that he and Trump had briefly adopted when they claimed that the Mueller report was a “complete and total exoneration”—which it does not seem to be. Since the release of Barr’s summary, the President and his lawyer had been insisting that Trump was the victim of “the single greatest hoax in the history of our country,” and that the Mueller results proved it. By Thursday morning, though, Trump was back to tweeting about “fake news” and the “witch hunt” and making clear that he did not want the full report to be released. Trump will keep calling it “the Collusion Delusion,” but the President noted that he was not fully rid of the investigation that has hung over his Presidency from its start. “Some Democrats are fighting hard to keep the Witch Hunt alive,” he tweeted. “There is nothing we can ever give to the Democrats that will make them happy. This is the highest level of Presidential Harassment in the history of our Country!”
He is right, at least on the first count. The “witch hunt” lives. The debate over the investigation is not over, and it won’t be until and unless Barr releases the report in full and there is a reliable account of what its findings actually are. I caught up with Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on the sidelines of a foreign-policy conference, a few minutes after Trump’s plaintive tweets. Last week, Schiff had eloquently punctured the President’s vindication rhetoric with a viral speech pointing out all of the disturbing questions that remain about Trump and his misleading, unexplained behavior toward Russia as it interfered in the 2016 election. The speech infuriated Trump, and he called out the congressman at a Michigan rally and on his Twitter feed, vilifying him as Shifty Schiff, among other names. Trump’s cry of complete exoneration seems even more questionable today, given the news reports, and Schiff told me that he and others had long had “well-placed skepticism” about Barr. Now, of course, Barr’s moves will be subjected to endless second-guessing. “He’ll have to answer,” Schiff said, to the serious questions about whether “he substituted his own opinion for those of the special counsel.”
There is no coverup that will last. One way or another, we will ultimately know what’s in the report; what happened behind the scenes in the Mueller probe; what, if anything, there is to claims that Trump and his team knew about the Russian hacking in 2016; and what the President did or didn’t do to shut down the investigation of it. “It is going to come out,” Schiff said, perhaps the one certainty in this otherwise uncertain moment.
So will history remember the Russia investigation as a hoax, I asked, or as a genuine scandal? Schiff wouldn’t answer directly, beyond saying that, for him, “The bar is not only what’s criminal; it should also be what’s ethical and what’s right.” As for the question of when Congress and the public will see the report and just what’s in it, the chairman told me that the matter is, once again, in Barr’s hands. “I think the Attorney General will release something,” Schiff said. “The question is: Is he going to release a redacted report or release his own report, knowing that large, blacked-out sections are going to look like he’s hiding something?”
While Washington waits, Trump, as always, has done his best to deflect, divert, distort, and distract from the investigations. Yet, while trying to get away from the question of his conduct in 2016, Trump may well have inadvertently resurrected the question of his fitness for office with a series of bizarre rants, false claims, and just plain odd digressions that were, even by his standards, hard to dismiss as anything resembling normal conduct by any President. There was, for example, Trump’s claim, in a speech the other night to National Republican Congressional Committee donors, that wind turbines cause cancer. Or his reckless threat to close the border with Mexico, apparently heedless or unaware of the consequences, which his top economic officials reportedly scrambled to explain to him in sufficiently apocalyptic terms.
Whenever you think that it can’t get any weirder, Trump escalates. That is what he did in a particularly ranty Oval Office appearance, on Tuesday, with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who was visiting Washington for what should have been a celebratory commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the NATO alliance. Trump, a NATO skeptic, despite his advisers’ best efforts to persuade him otherwise, was not even going to the commemorative event, which had been recast by NATO as a foreign-ministers’ summit, to avoid the embarrassment of another Trumpian diatribe. But the President, who once declared the nation’s most important security partnership “obsolete,” still managed to flub the diplomatic moment by not bothering to mention the NATO anniversary at all in his Oval Office visit with Stoltenberg. (He did, it should be noted, manage to compliment Stoltenberg, though only for supporting Trump’s campaign to demand more defense spending by NATO members, for which Trump bestowed the ultimate praise of noting, “He gave me credit.”)
That was not the weird part, however. That came when Trump started in on his now familiar complaint about Germany’s level of defense spending, which remains far below the two-per-cent-of-G.D.P. threshold that NATO members committed to spend by 2024. Trump carries on so frequently about this German failure that it’s as if he feels that he personally is being ripped off. The President’s Germany riff took a most surprising turn, however, when he started to lecture Stoltenberg and the assembled media about his own German roots. My father, he told them, was not only born in Germany but in a “very wonderful place” there. The problem, of course, is that it isn’t true, and Trump knows that full well. Making the untrue claim that his father was born in Germany was all the more amazing because Trump had spent decades denying that his father was of German heritage, instead falsely claiming, including in his best-selling nineteen-eighties book “The Art of the Deal,” that his father was Swedish.
In fact, the Oval Office appearance with Stoltenberg was the third time that Trump has repeated this particular whopper since becoming President. I watched the video of his Tuesday appearance several times, stopping to rewind at the point where Trump embellished his fib. It’s not just that he said his father was born in Germany; what gets me is adding the clause that his father was born in a great place there. That’s why it’s clear that this is not a flub or a simple misstatement on the part of the President, whose grandfather, not his father, was born in a town in the far west of Germany, near the French border. The added clause is the tell here, the lie in full; his father wasn’t just born in Germany but in a “very wonderful place” there. Inevitably, reporters pounced and, by Wednesday, there was Fred Trump’s birth certificate on the Internet, courtesy of the Washington Post writer Philip Bump. It shows Frederick Trump to be what we always knew he was: a native of New York City, with neat bureaucratic script confirming his birth, in the Bronx, on October 11, 1905. There is truly almost nothing about which this President will not lie, whether it’s the Mueller report or his family history. Trump has become a birther again—this time about his own father.
