Wallace: There’s no question there were contacts.
But I think when you and other Democrats, I’m not saying it’s just you, talked about
collusion, there was the feeling of a working arrangement, an agreement, and that the, somehow
the Trump campaign was involved in the hacking of the DNC and the Podesta emails and that
there was a back and forth, a working relationship, as opposed to individual meetings.
Do you have evidence of that kind of working relationship that the Mueller report didn’t
seem to find?
Schiff: Well Chris, first of all, I never said that the Trump campaign was involved
in the hacking itself.
What I did say is that for example, in that Trump Tower meeting, there was a clear intent
to collude with the Russians, there was a willingness to receive Russian help, the president
himself called on the Russians to assist his campaign by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails.
And if you look at pages 180-190, that discuss that Trump Tower meeting, it wasn’t that
they didn’t find a lack of evidence of all the things that I talked about.
In fact the meeting did take place, in fact they did offer dirt on Hillary Clinton, in
fact the president’s son did say he would love to have it, in fact the president’s
son lied about it, in fact the president was involved in dictating that lie.
All the facts I said are proven.
But what Bob Mueller said, the reason he didn’t charge Don Jr. and Jared Kushner and Paul
Manafort is that he found that he could not establish with admissible evident that Don
Jr. knew that he was breaking the law, that he was essentially ignorant of the law.
Now with respect to Paul Manafort, we only have one sentence as to why someone with that
experience didn’t know that seeking the help and receiving the help of a foreign government
was a crime.
And that’s something that we’re gonna want to ask Bob Mueller about when he testifies.
Bob Mueller also said that he couldn’t establish the value of the dirt they got.
So I would say this to Kellyanne Conway: The only reason that Bob Mueller says that he
didn’t charge a crime about the Trump Tower meeting was because he believed that Don Jr.
was too ignorant of the law to be charged.
And that the Russians didn’t deliver the dirt they promised.
Not that the campaign didn’t try to get dirt.
But the Russians didn’t live up to their end of the bargain.
This is House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff blowing a whole in Trump’s endless
refrain that there was “no collusion.”
The most important point that he noted was that there was intent for the White House
to collude with the Russians.
Even the Mueller report itself said that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit”
from Russian involvement, so to pretend like all of these instances of clear-cut collusion
don’t exist is just political theater.
And, to be honest, it’s ironic that Trump has made “no collusion” his rallying cry
because that’s the one thing we do know happened.
Even the Mueller report itself says that it wasn’t that there wasn’t evidence of collusion,
it’s that the investigation didn’t prove that it rose to the level of criminal conspiracy,
which, as the Mueller report states would “require an agreement – tacit or express
– between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.”
But as for the collusion, we’ve… seen it play out before our eyes.
We know that there was a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on
Hillary Clinton.
We know that George Papadopoulos bragged to an Australian diplomat that the Russians had
that dirt.
We know that Paul Manafort shared polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, who has links
to the Kremlin.
We know that Trump asked the Russians to find Hillary Clinton’s emails because, um, we
heard it on national television.
Trump: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that
are missing.
I think you’ll probably be rewarded mightily by the press.
You’d think that a master brander like Trump would do better than to pick the ONE thing
that he was actually guilty of when trying to exonerate himself in the court of public
opinion.
It’s like him spending all day trying to convince the public that his marriage is healthy.
Maybe… maybe focus on anything else.
And so while the White House might point to the fact that Robert Mueller didn’t charge
Trump or his family with crimes as evidence of complete and total exoneration, that’s
not the case whatsoever.
As Schiff said, the only reason Don Jr. isn’t in jail is because Mueller couldn’t PROVE
that he knew taking that Trump Tower meeting was a crime or that they couldn’t establish
the value of the dirt from that meeting.
But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t the intent to collude, to work with the Russians,
to meet with them and exchange information and work toward a common goal, which, clearly,
there was.
And anyone whose head isn’t buried in the sand can see that, and Congress will take
that information and decides whether they’ll use it to impeach Trump.
From Bill Barr’s misleading 4-page summary to his off-the-wall press conference to the
endless Fox News spin machine to the White House’s own acknowledgement that they’d
be ramping up attacks regardless of what the Mueller report showed, this has never been
about the results of the investigation.
The fact that Trump is still yelling out “no collusion” is proof of that.
This is about the President of the United States gaslighting the American public with
some Orwellian strategy to convince us that we don’t know what we already know and that
we haven’t seen what we’ve seen with our own eyes.