Confused nation longs to hear Mueller speak

By NANCY BENAC

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

See Bob investigate. Read Bob’s report. Wait, Bob, what?

For nearly two years, the nation watched and waited as special counsel Robert Mueller investigated President Donald Trump and his campaign for potential collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice.

The release of a redacted version of Mueller’s 448-page report last month offered a long-awaited moment of closure for many — and an utterly unsatisfying cliffhanger for plenty of others.

Three weeks of public parsing and analysis have left them wondering just what Mueller was trying to say and what he really thinks, particularly on the question of obstruction, where the document drew no conclusion. That uncertainty has given partisans on both sides an opening to frame Mueller’s findings to their liking and left many Americans, unlikely to read the full report, scratching their heads about what to believe and whom to trust.

Enough with the printed page, they say, enough with the punditry: Speak, Bob, speak!

Melissa Garcia, a 29-year-old health counselor, pauses outside a restaurant in Quakertown, Pa., to compare the two-volume Mueller report to the kind of “terms and conditions” legalese that most consumers skip right over. She’d love a “CliffsNotes version” from Mueller himself.

“I would just ask him to sum it up because he knows it the best. I’d want the shorthand version but the most important details,” says Garcia, an independent who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Republican Becky McBreen, a 58-year-old Trump voter from Schuylkill Haven, Pa., who works at an aluminum company, says she’d like to ask Mueller: “Leaving out the political bias, do you, in your heart of hearts, truly think that Trump colluded with Russia to sabotage Hillary?” (The report did not find a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign.)

Democrat Adam Singer, a 52-year-old e-commerce worker who was running errands in Miami Beach, Fla., says he’s eager for Mueller to “get up publicly on television and give his take on the report.”

“I don’t believe we have been told the whole story,” Singer says.

It’s not just ordinary Americans who are craving clarity.

Having pored over the report once, Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., is now on her second reading of it. And she still has questions.

“That’s why we need him to testify,” she said. “I think he owes it to us.”

Richard Ben-Veniste, who served as one of the lead prosecutors on the Watergate investigation, says Mueller “probably could have been clearer.”

“It would certainly be in the public interest for Robert Mueller to answer questions, clarify and expound upon his investigation and his report,” says Ben-Veniste.

David Kendall represented President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky investigation and currently represents the Clintons. He goes further in a Washington Post opinion piece and says Mueller made a “massive flinch” in declining to draw a conclusion on obstruction.

Absent a firm answer from the special counsel himself, plenty of others — including Trump — have stepped forward to act as interpreters of the oracle.