-Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team
is speaking out about their final report.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
♪♪
The one thing -- maybe the only thing --
Donald Trump loves about being president
is campaigning for president.
Whenever he's in the White House doing his actual job,
he looks like he's waiting in a doctor's office
for a colonoscopy.
But then, when he's on stage, in front of his adoring fans,
he lights up.
I mean, just look at the difference.
It's like the before-and-after from a Prozac commercial.
That is the face of a man who just heard the phrase,
"Good news, there are no criminal charges."
In fact, Trump was clearly ecstatic
after his attorney general, William Barr, sent a letter
claiming that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report
had not established a conspiracy
between Trump's campaign and Russia.
And Trump has spent nearly two weeks celebrating,
despite the fact that he doesn't actually know
what's in Mueller's report.
-It's a disgrace what happened.
This was a terrible thing that was put onto our country.
Nobody's seen anything like this.
Probably never happened before.
Beautiful conclusion.
I haven't seen the report. Beautiful conclusion.
-A beautiful conclu--
You just said you hadn't seen the report.
I'd love to hear his summary of "The Sixth Sense."
"I haven't seen the movie, but it's beau--
everyone's alive at the end."
And even...
Even if you had seen the report, it's nearly 400 pages.
There's no way you'd be able
to actually make it to the conclusion.
I doubt you've ever read anything that long in your life.
If you locked Trump in a room and told him,
"Don't come out until you've read the whole report,"
you'd open the door the next day
and see him surrounded by Big Mac wrappers
and cans of Red Bull,
hair disheveled, bags under his eyes,
and you'd say, "How far have you gotten?"
and he'd go, "So far, Matt. 'Written by Robert Mueller.'
[ Laughter ]
And then I hit the wall."
Still, even though Trump has not seen the report,
he cannot help but ramble on and on
about how he'd been vindicated and how he defeated his critics
at a rally in Michigan last week.
-After three years of lies and smears and slander,
the Russia hoax is finally dead.
The collusion delusion is over.
They tried to divide our country,
to poison the national debate,
and to tear up the fabric of our great democracy.
And they're on...artificial respirators right now.
[ Cheers and applause ]
They're getting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
-They need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?
Every time you do a rally,
you look like a guy in an episode of "Baywatch"
who fell off a party boat and got dragged back to the beach
by David Hasselhoff.
When you give a speech,
you suck in air like you're about to go underwater.
-[ Inhaling ]
-So, Trump's handpicked attorney general looked over the report,
decided Trump had been exonerated, Trump celebrated,
and we all took his word for it and moved on, until last night,
when Mueller's team started to speak out.
-Breaking news overnight.
The New York Times reveals the Mueller report
may be far more damaging for President Trump
than Attorney General Bill Barr has led on.
The Times says some of Robert Mueller's investigators
have told close associates that Bill Barr did not
adequately capture the findings
of the nearly two-year-long probe
in his four-page summary to Congress.
-And the fact that we're even hearing this
really means something
because the Mueller team never leaks to the press.
I mean, look at him.
Robert Mueller's wife still doesn't know his middle name.
"That's between me and the government."
So, now they're saying Barr's summary,
the one Trump spent two weeks celebrating, is inaccurate.
Wow, when Trump heard that, he needed...
-Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
-Look, we don't know what's in the full report.
We have no idea if there's anything shocking
or significantly different from what's in the Barr summary,
but it's remarkable that Mueller's team
is suddenly speaking out to reporters
after two years of total and complete silence.
It's like when you try to get the Queen's Guard to flinch,
and they're just totally still for an hour,
and then you go, "Let's get in line for the tour,"
and they say, "It's called a queue."
[ Laughter ]
Mueller's team is apparently frustrated
in part because they actually wrote up several summaries
of their findings themselves for public consumption,
and Barr ignored all those summaries
and chose to write his own
that said the president had been exonerated.
-Mueller's team had written some summaries
around this report, and that those summaries,
they anticipated, would be something
that Barr could use to be made public,
and that it wasn't,
and so there's frustration there.
-"The Special Counsel's investigators
had already written multiple summaries of the report,
and some team members believe
that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material
in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24th
laying out their main conclusions."
-So Mueller's team wrote their own summaries for the public,
and Barr chose to ignore those summaries and write his own.
As a general rule, I'm always suspicious
of anyone who chooses to do more work
when they have the option not to.
I mean, we don't actually write a new "Closer Look" every night.
We just buy it from a website called politicalrants.com.
Tonight's "Closer Look" was written by...
Gary from Oregon.
Thank you, Gary.
[ Applause ] Give it up for Gary, everyone.
The "It's called a queue" line went better than I thought.
[ Laughter ]
Republicans have been eager to declare Trump exonerated
and quickly move on from all that
rather than wait for the full report.
In fact, Trump and his aides have said
they want to take their victory
and set the stage for the 2020 election.
Last week, for example,
Trump's former strategist Steve Bannon
took human form and appeared on CNN
to tell Anderson Cooper he didn't think any Democrat
could compete with Trump in 2020.
-At the end of the day,
the Democrats, I think, are gonna focus on somebody
who can beat Donald Trump,
and they're gonna search for that.
It's not gonna be a policy discussion.
It's gonna be electability.
And if you're gonna beat Donald Trump as an incumbent,
you're gonna have to bring it, right?
You're gonna really have to bring it.
In the field I've seen so far,
I don't know anybody that can hit a fast ball
like Donald Trump can throw.
-First of all, Steve,
thank you for joining us from the other side.
[ Laughter ]
What's going on with you, man?
You look like the ghost of a dead ghost.
I mean...
[ Applause ]
That whole thing looked like an interview
with a before-and-after of a guy who takes Prozac
and a guy who snorts it.
[ Laughter ]
Second, of all the things that you can say about Donald Trump,
he cannot throw a fast ball.
Have you ever seen him throw out the first pitch
at a baseball game?
Look at his face.
He looks like he's farting
and pulling a muscle at the same time.
This is why we need to see the full Mueller report
as soon as possible.
For two years, we've been waiting for answers,
and instead, we've been getting lies from the president
and unconfirmed rumors going from...
-Mouth-to-mouth.
-This has been "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]