California congressman to Mueller: Where is proof Russian government was behind 2016 trolling?

California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock accused Special Counsel Robert Mueller of misleading the American people with his report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election and tried to cast doubt about the widely accepted belief that the Russian government was behind Internet trolls that meddled in the campaign.

“The problem we’re having is we have to rely on your report for an accurate reflection of the evidence and we’re starting to find out that’s not true,” McClintock told Mueller in the House Judiciary Committee hearing, the first of Mueller’s two highly-anticipated appearances before Congress on Wednesday.

“For example ... you have left the clear impression throughout the country, through your report, that it was the Russian government behind the troll farms,” said McClintock, who represents California’s 4th congressional district. “And yet when you’re called upon to provide actual evidence in court, you fail to do so.”

Specifically, McClintock pointed to a case between the United States government and one of the Russian companies indicted by the Special Counsel’s office in relation to its findings about interference in the 2016 election.

McClintock appeared to be drawing on a July 11 article on the conservative news site The Federalist, which argued that the legal back-and-forth in that case disproves the notion that the Russian government had ties to the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg-based troll farm that is accused of using social media to try and sway the U.S. presidential election.

The special counsel’s report, however, is hardly the first government entity to say there were links between 2016 election interference and the Russian government. In a 2017 report, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.”

Even the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, echoed that point. “Russia meddled in the 2016 election,” Collins said. “But the president did not conspire with Russians. Nothing we hear today will change those facts.”

Mueller, for his part, told McClintock that he disputed his “characterization of what occurred in that proceeding,” but he declined to provide further clarity about the case or the government’s arguments.

He also refused to answer McClintock’s questions about information left out of the report, which the congressman suggested was done “in order to cast the president unfairly in a negative light.”

McClintock pointed to the special counsel’s decision to include only a portion of the transcript of a call between one of President Donald Trump’s lawyers and a lawyer for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn plead guilty in 2017 to lying to the F.B.I. related as part of the investigation into Russian meddling.

The segment of the transcript that in the Mueller report makes “it appear that [Trump’s lawyer] was improperly asking for confidential information,” McClintock said, but elsewhere in the transcript the same lawyer added that he was not asking for such information.

“Why did you edit the transcript to hide the exculpatory part of the message?” McClintock asked.

“I’m not sure I would agree your characterization that we did anything to hide” it, Mueller replied. But, he added, “I’m not going to go further.”

Republicans seized on Mueller’s evasiveness as yet more evidence his report was misleading, poisoned by a politically-biased investigation. It’s a case they’ve been trying to make since he was first appointed special counsel.

McClintock, who represents Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Mariposa and Tuolumne counties as well as parts of Fresno, Madera, Nevada and Placer, previously accused Mueller of “pettifoggery.” “He prefers to make innuendoes while hiding behind DOJ guidelines,” McClintock complained after Mueller’s May 29 press conference.

On Wednesday, the president retweeted conservative commentators calling the investigation a “hoax” and a “coup cabal.”

Democrats, meanwhile, highlighted the fact that Mueller denied that the special counsel’s report exonerated the president from charges of obstruction and collusion, as Trump has repeatedly claimed. Asked whether the president could be charged with obstruction of justice after he leaves office, Mueller replied, “yes.”

This story was originally published July 24, 2019 at 10:43 AM.