wednesday, july 17th. this is big news. word broke just a few minutes ago in a joint statement from the chairman of the house intelligence and house judiciary committees, congressman adam schiff of california and congressman jerrold nadler of new york. this is their statement which they ve just released, and i ll tell you just been handed to me so i am reading this as you are. today house judiciary committee chairman jerrold nadler and house committee chairman adam schiff announced special counsel robert mueller has agreed to testify per opportunity to a subpoena before the house judiciary committee and house intelligence committee in open session on wednesday, july 17th. in announcing the testimony, nadler and schiff here by release this joint statement. pursuant to subpoenas issued by the judiciary and intelligence committees today, the special counsel has agreed to testify before both committees in open session on julisonth. americans have demanded to hear directly from the special
apparently has agreed to comply with it. is that your understanding of it? that s my understanding. at the end of the day, bob mueller is a company man. he had expressed publicly his reluctance to testify, indicated when he gave his remarks a few weeks ago that that was the first time the american people would likely hear from him. we as house democrats led by chairman nadler and chairman schiff have made clear that we believe the issues connected to the mueller report were so serious that it was important for the special counsel to tell his story publicly to the american people. we were determined to bring that about. thanks to the leadership of our two chairmen, united behind the house democratic caucus and our objectives, we ll be able to bring that about on july 17th. do you expect there to be a kind of working agreement between the two chairmen about what the two hearings will cover? for example, will you tend to leave volume i of the report to the intelligence committee and h
so there is a whole range of questions maybe stopping at what are your what were your inner thoughts that i think he will be duty bound to answer and mueller s a dutiful guy. now, perhaps barr orders him to stand down on certain topics, but that s problematic in and of itself. i ve seen mueller testify before. he is not cagey. while he may desire to stick to the four corners, he will be responsive, and that means a number of things. what would be the one i d most like? this question, mr. mueller, if there were not the olc memo, would you have charged the
big controversial congressional investigation all the way back to watergate some of the most effective questioning is sometimes done not by elected members but by professional staff. will that be part of the way that you approach this with mueller? you know, we re going to sit down as a committee and have this discussion. we have in our discussions with the special counsel arranged so that we ll have sufficient time that if we go through the traditional format, every member will be able to ask questions. we may choose to allocate the time among the members differently than that. and it s true that when we have interviewed fact witnesses, and we just conducted the interviews within the last week with a fact witness, we have often staff-led interviews that go on for a period of time where we will ask questions for an hour then the other side will ask questions for an hour. we ll have to determine whether because this is not a fact witness, per se, whether we will use the traditional
understanding how the president of the united states committed acts of felony obstruction of justice. i was one of those federal prosecutors who wrote that the president would be in handcuffs doing a perp walk as a criminal defendant but for his being a sitting president. and i think that the face and voice of robert mueller in effect the movie depicting the book, which most americans won t read, will have a gripping powerful effect on america as a whole as well as on congress. let s listen to what robert mueller said on that day a month ago when he spoke. and he talked about the constitution requiring a process other than the indictment process to accuse a sitting president. let s listen to that. first, the opinion explicitly