The real story about whether Robert Mueller already has the House Intel Committee transcripts
Last night a number of news outlets and political pundits, including the brilliant Rachel Maddow, reported that the House Intelligence Committee can’t turn over any Trump-Russia testimony transcripts yet to Robert Mueller. The reason: the House GOP is refusing to appoint people to the committee, thus preventing a vote to turn over the transcripts. But here’s the thing. This is incorrect, and I can prove it.
Yesterday, Robert Mueller arrested Roger Stone on criminal charges that included lying to the House Intelligence Committee. This is spelled out in detail in the Stone indictment. By law, Mueller can’t indict anyone for lying to Congress unless he has the official transcripts to prove it; leaked or unofficial copies don’t count as proper evidence. In fact, last month, during the transition period, the House Intel Committee voted to turn over the Stone transcript to Mueller, according to the New York Daily News. So what’s really going on here?
Our best guess is that the Republicans on the House Intel Committee coughed up the Stone transcript because Mueller was going to subpoena it anyway, and after all their prior antics, they didn’t want to risk sticking their neck out even further into obstruction of justice territory. But the bottom line, is that we have proof that Mueller has the Stone transcript.
Now try to imagine a scenario in which Robert Mueller backs House Republicans into a corner where they feel they have no choice but to turn over the Roger Stone transcript, yet he lets them off the hook when it comes to the Donald Trump Jr transcript or the Erik Prince transcript. Mueller is smarter and more savvy than that. So there’s little doubt Mueller already has all the transcripts.
So what’s all the hubbub about in the House Intelligence Committee? The Republicans on that committee already decided to protect themselves at Donald Trump’s expense when they forked over the Roger Stone transcript. So the most logical conclusion is that their current refusal to seat the full committee is mere theatrics, to keep Trump from figuring out that they’re no longer protecting him. In any case, the one fact here is that Mueller has the Stone transcript – so it’s very difficult to imagine that he doesn’t also have the others.
