Mueller Testifies Before Congress
Gabriella Demczuk, Gabriella Demczuk
We ran the numbers: There are 10812 news articles covering this topic. 38% (4126) are left leaning, 47% (5037) center, 15% (1649) right leaning.
On Wednesday, July 24th, Robert Mueller appeared to testify on Capitol Hill before two congressional committees, the House Judiciary and the Intelligence Committee. According to NPR, both of these committees subpoenaed Mueller last month instructing him to appear and respond to questions about his “investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.”
In his opening statement, Mueller stated “Over the course of my career, I’ve seen a number of challenges to our democracy...The Russian government’s effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious. As I said on May 29, this deserves the attention of every American." USAToday reported that his questioning on Wednesday lasted nearly eight hours, as many Americans wanted to hear directly from him about the investigation despite his 448-page report being made public in April. The New York Times reported that throughout the testimony, Mueller hewed tightly to the script of the report.
Yahoo News published a center leaning article that noted that commentators and politicians from both the left and the right criticized Mueller and his performance during Wednesday’s testimony for being “unprepared”, “shaky” and “halting,” pointing out the uncertainty of his delivery for many across the spectrum.
From the right, an opinion writer argued that throughout the testimony, “Mueller was that bad, seemingly hard of hearing, often confused, and contradicted himself several times.” The opinion article in the New York Post claimed that his detached testimony and report read like it was written by far-left reporters, leading many to believe that Mueller’s team and the media “were joined at the hip from the get-go.” Furthermore, the right expanded on the “bizarre standard” that Mueller’s team created “where Trump’s presumption of innocence was shredded because they could not find sufficient evidence to “exonerate” him.” The New York Post concluded based on Mueller’s various flaws throughout the testimony that “the Dems’ fantasy of having him breathe life into his report backfired.”
From the left, the New York Times reported that some of the highlight moments during his testimony were when Mueller “warned lawmakers on Wednesday that Russia was again trying to sabotage American democracy before next year’s presidential election, defended his investigation’s conclusions about Moscow’s sweeping interference campaign in 2016 and publicly rejected President Trump’s criticism that he had conducted a ‘witch hunt.’” The New York Times reported that Democrats got Mueller to confirm “many of the most damaging elements of his findings.” Mueller additionally “confirmed that the president had not been cleared of obstructing justice, nor had he been completely exonerated, as Mr. Trump has so often declared.” In addition, Mueller agreed that “the president had been untruthful in some of his under-oath responses during the probe” and “he called Mr. Trump’s encouragement of WikiLeaks problematic.”
NBC News concluded that Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony on July 24th was significant in that it was damaging for Donald Trump as it contradicted his Russian interference claims but it basically closed the door on the likelihood of his impeachment.