as special counsel and in ten minutes outlined his top line findings, not bill barr s findings including the fact if he could have exonerated president trump, he would have but he was not able to do so. and that reverberated throughout both washington and the larger national conversation for days and days. so who knows what having robert mueller speak for several hours before two different congressional committees will show and what it will surface for the american public that has not read the report. katy, another topic on your beat has to do with the citizen ship question on our national census, for give me, it s
decided to come out and give a short speech he s stepping down as special counsel and in ten minutes outlined his top line findings, not bill barr s findings including the fact if he could have exonerated president trump, he would have but he was not able to do so. and that reverberated throughout both washington and the larger national conversation for days and days. so who knows what having robert mueller speak for several hours before two different congressional committees will show and what it will surface for the american public that has not read the report. katy, another topic on your beat has to do with the citizen ship question on our national census, for give me, it s monday. the trump administration tried and lost on this before the supreme court. none other than the chief justice found their reasoning contrived. the a.g. says they are going to
we can t see? i think that the attorney general barr is saying something technically true. he is saying that bob mueller has already publicly said that if forced to firefighttestify b congress, he plans to go no further than the 448-page report that he s written and submitted with his two-year investigation into russian interference or contact or cooperation between russia and the trump campaign. when bill barr says listen, i don t think this will make a ton of news because everybody knows what robert mueller is going to say, he s again technically correct but i think what this down plays is the real power of having robert mueller speak publicly will convey to audiences all across the country and the world. we ve already seen it happen once when bob mueller and may decided to km out acome out and short speech he s stepping down as special counsel and in ten minutes outlined his top line
credible job, and so it is really important to give voice to that. it would be an opportunity if he does testify in public, for him to respond to the president s latest accusation that he s a never trumper. absolutely. so certainly you would expect bob mueller to defend the integrity and conduct of his investigation, but i think gloria s right. in those eight minutes, robert mueller did more to shape sort of public perception about his report than essentially six weeks of congress grappling with the written materials, and so i do think that congress really got some insight into how potentially elect frifying even just him sitting there reading the report would believe. either to shape it or unshape what the attorney general did weeks ago when he came out and gave those top line findings, no coordination, no conspiracy without sort of enhancing some of the specific findings of special counsel mueller. and we would have live
cameras. so, barbara, what do you make of the fact that robert mueller is now, for the first time, going to go before the cameras? yeah. i think it s a very surprising development. as you mentioned, he has always shunned the public eye. he does not see the media as part of his job. he tunes it out. he has certainly testified publicly before congress many times. but it may be that he wants to seize control here. he sees himself perhaps as a bit of a pawn of is he going to testify? he is going to do it publicly? he required testifying behind closed doors. if he has something to say, maybe he wants to say it on his own terms. this would give him an opportunity to do that. i think the only hint we have about the content of any frustration he may be feeling comes in that letter he sent to william barr where he complained that william barr mischaracterized the content, nature and substance of his report. he may be frustrated that the content of his report has been lost and give himself a c