Has the Mueller Report Changed Anything?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2019

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

The Mueller investigation has been a two-year obsession for nearly everyone who cares about politics in America. For one side, the special counsel was a bête noire, a leader of a witch hunt; for the other, Mueller was a deus ex machina who would end the political disruptions of Trumpism. But the report received by Attorney General William Barr was highly ambivalent, neither indicting nor exonerating the President, and leaving to the A.G. to decide the crucial question of obstruction of justice. To weigh the consequences of the Mueller report, David Remnick sat down with the staff writers Masha Gessen and Susan Glasser. “Any other political figure of course would be glad that an investigation like this is over, and would want to move on as quickly as possible,” Glasser notes. “True to form, [Trump] is already talking about various vindictive moves, and ‘investigating the investigators.’ . . . It’s a strategy compatible with his overall approach of appealing to his supporters, and maximum divisiveness.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.3	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For two years, both sides have looked to the Mueller investigation with real obsessiveness.
0:18.4	For Republicans and defenders of the president, Mueller was their
0:21.6	bet noir, the walking incarnation of an establishment that had it out for Donald Trump.
0:27.9	A witch hunt, the president called it, over and over. For Democrats, Mueller was a kind of
0:33.7	Deus X. Machina, a god who would descend and make it all right, who would report and
0:38.7	reveal everything and somehow forced Donald Trump from office. Not everyone was expecting the
0:45.8	ambivalence of the document that Mueller delivered. There were no new indictments, but nor did
0:51.1	completely exonerate the president. And the document also punted to the Attorney General
0:56.2	on the crucial question of obstruction of justice.
1:00.0	So after two years of obsession, where are we?
1:03.3	What happens now in Washington?
1:05.3	I put those questions to staff writers Susan Glasser and Masha Gessen.
1:10.4	Masha, you've been warning about two big things for almost two years.
1:15.3	On the one hand, you've been arguing that Donald Trump is every bit as bad as his worst critics say.
1:21.6	You've even used the word totalitarian to describe him, which is a, which is, which is, well, he would be if he could be, yes. If he had the skills and he had the system to, him, which is a... Well, he would be if he could be, yes.
1:29.3	If he had the skills and he had the system to back him up.
1:33.2	On the other hand, you've been warning that the notion of collusion
1:38.2	was a kind of fantasy that you couldn't really see as a possibility.
1:45.8	Am I being accurate in that summary? Yeah, I mean, obviously, I haven't known, and we still don't fully know, although
1:54.0	there's credible indication that collusion wasn't found by the person who could have found
1:59.9	it.
	...

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