Trump takes victory lap; parties start to pivot past Russia

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

An exuberant President Donald Trump took a victory lap on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, emboldened by the end of the special counsel’s Russia probe, even as Democrats pressed insistently for Robert Mueller’s full report and Justice Department officials said more information could be released in “weeks, not months.”

Trump strode into a high-spirited gathering of Senate Republicans, flanked by party leaders, saying the attorney general’s weekend summary of Mueller’s report “could not have been better.” GOP senators applauded his arrival, and he celebrated what he called his “clean bill of health.”

But challenges are ahead for both the Republicans and the Democrats who hope to deny Trump re-election next year. Both parties are readjusting their aims and strategies in the post-probe landscape, pivoting to health care and other issues that are more important for many voters, even with Mueller’s full findings still unknown.

At House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s own closed-door caucus meeting Tuesday, she urged rank-and-file Democrats to “be calm” and focus on the policy promises of health care, jobs and oversight of the administration that helped propel them to the House majority last fall.

“Let’s just get the goods,” Pelosi said.

Not that the Democrats are forgetting Russia and the 2016 presidential election. Many Democrats dismiss the four-page summary released by Attorney General William Barr as inadequate.

“I haven’t seen the Mueller report. I’ve seen the Barr report. And I’m not going to base anything on the Barr report,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

“The president is saying he’s been completely and totally exonerated by the report,” Raskin said. “The one sentence we’ve seen from the report says this is not an exoneration of the president.”

Meanwhile, a Justice Department official said it will take Barr “weeks, not months” to finish reviewing Mueller’s longer, still-confidential report and make a version available for the public. It’s not clear whether that will be Mueller’s own words or another synopsis.

Trump has said he “wouldn’t mind” if the full report were released.

In other news, a former Trump campaign aide central to the early days of the FBI’s Russia investigation said the FBI wanted him to wear a wire to record conversations with a professor who had told him the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

George Papadopoulos, the first of five Trump aides to plead guilty and agree to cooperate in special counsel Robert Mueller’s recently concluded investigation, told House lawmakers and staff in a closed-door interview last October that he rejected the FBI request.