Rachel Maddow reacts to Robert Mueller’s passing

Breaking news. Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who later became special counsel in charge of investigating Donald Trump's ties to Russia during his first term, passed away on Friday. He was 81 years old. The cause of death is not yet known, but Mueller was said to have been suffering from Parkinson's disease for years. Mueller leaves behind a multi-decade legacy where, after becoming FBI director in 2001, he went on to transform the Bureau into a 21st century intelligence service that could

protect national security and civil liberties. His work earned him bipartisan praise, working under Republican presidents like George W. Bush and then later under Democratic President Barack Obama, who asked him to stay on for two more years at the end of Mueller's tenure. Mueller would later become a household name when he led a two-year investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election and its ties to Donald Trump.

Mueller's groundbreaking work resulted in 34 indictments and guilty pleas, including from Trump's former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, the deputy campaign chair Rick Gates, and of course, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. And while Mueller did not conclude that Trump had committed a crime, he famously said of the report, quote, it does not exonerate him. Meanwhile, Trump reacted to Mueller's death on Truth Social, writing, quote,

Robert Mueller just died. Good, I'm glad he's dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people. But whether Trump likes it or not, Mueller's legacy will no doubt leave a lasting impact as someone who dared to try to hold him accountable.

Our friend and colleague Rachel Maddow, host of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNOW, joins us. Rachel, no better person to talk to in this network about this story and Robert Mueller than you. Thank you so much for making time for us. And you certainly know this investigation more intimately than anyone else does.

You covered this for years. And as I just laid out there, you know, the investigation did not establish the Trump campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election activities. It more importantly did not exonerate the Trump campaign and led to multiple convictions and guilty pleas from people that were in his inner circle. What was your reaction to the passing of Robert Mueller and what his passing means for this

chapter of Trump's political life?

Well, first of all, Eamon, thanks for having me, you guys. It's a real privilege to be with you on this topic and on this night. I — you know, I mean, it's — there aren't very many people for whom I would say this, but it is the end of an era. I mean, Robert Mueller is the last in a line of people that I don't think we'll ever see

the likes of again. I mean, simply just the fact that we had a FBI director for 10 years, and in his case, 12 years, longest serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover, after he was appointed during the George W. Bush administration, then extended by the Democratic president who came after George W. Bush, who couldn't have been more different than George W. Bush, Barack Obama.

There just aren't very many figures like that in American public life anymore. There aren't very many, and I don't mean this in a, I don't mean this in a sort of personal or mean way, but there aren't many like lifelong rock ribbed Republican public officials who are most known for their propriety and their nonpartisan competence and willingness to rise both above party and above, I think, personal intention. And so he feels like he's from an older time in our history. But that said, the legacy that I think weighs most heavily now at the time of his passing

is what happened after his FBI tenure was done with the Mueller report. There's a reason on a day like this we need to remind people what was in Mueller's report, what were the results of his investigation. And that's because of a failure on his part. That is because once his investigation and his report were concluded, he was just wildly outmaneuvered by a really serpentine attorney general named Bill Barr, who played really

dirty pool when it came to the handling and release of the information from Mueller's investigation. Mueller, I don't know if he was blindsided by it or if he thought Barr was a good guy and would be a straight shooter on this, but Barr absolutely buried him in terms of, in terms of the impact of that report. And given the way that Bill Barr became attorney general, Mueller and his team should have seen that coming. If they did see it coming, they should have come up with a way to outmaneuver

Barr while he was outmaneuvering them, and they didn't. And that bureaucratic failure is the most important thing in American history about the Mueller report—not his findings, but the way they were submarined by a, in my opinion, disreputable, dishonorable set of actions by the attorney general who handled the release of that report.

Rachel, can you walk us back through some of the most critical findings and revelations from that report? You know, I don't think anyone at this table would disagree with what you described as him as sort of this singular figure. That's in large part because Trump and his allies have done basically everything they possibly could do to sideline and push out of public life Republican figures who would be willing to challenge him, who would be seen as credible, who would

do this work in a straightforward and facts-first manner. And so, for people who may have forgotten because of the work that has been done to undermine it, to whitewash it, to make sure people barely remember what is in it, can you remind people what the American public learned through this report and why it still matters today?

Yeah, the findings are pretty simple, actually. And I think that part of the sort of political game that Mueller lost around the release of his findings was making it seem like it was complex or too difficult to explain to somebody on the back of an envelope. But it was pretty simple. They found definite, absolutely conclusive evidence that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump become president, that the Trump campaign was aware of it and

expected to benefit from it, and that they took steps to obstruct the investigation into it. There were more than two dozen people who were charged with felonies. They charged the Russians, they charged the Internet Research Agency, they charged multiple figures from the Russian government and intelligence services, they charged Trump's campaign chairman, they charged Trump's campaign, deputy campaign chairman, they charged Trump's campaign—deputy campaign chairman. They charged Trump's national security adviser.

They charged a number of people who were associated with the campaign. And those findings, that Russia helped, that Trump knew Russia was helping him, and that Trump tried to make sure that the investigation into it didn't proceed unimpeded, that should have been enough. And it really wasn't. And there was an important element of the way that Mueller drew his conclusions, which is that he basically said, you know, under DOJ rules, we don't charge sitting presidents.

And if we can't charge him, then I can't really lay out the evidence against him either, because that would amount to an accusation that's unfair to make because he's not able to rebut it in court because we're not going to bring him into court. But I think there were other ways to approach that. That would have made it more clear to the American public. And when Bill Barr, as then Attorney General, newly appointed Attorney General, decided to bury and misrepresent the report to the

public, Mueller's response was one. It was, it was a letter published, you know, 25 days later sternly saying, hey, hey, that's not what my report means. But that was kind of the full strategy that Mueller and his team had in terms of dealing with the really underhanded mismanagement, well, not even mismanagement, the underhanded,

I think, treatment of this by Bill Barr, and they just got outplayed. Robert Mueller got outplayed by Bill Barr, and that was the end of what should have been a show-stopping, certainly presidency-stopping investigation

with damning conclusions.

So, Rachel, what do you think Mueller could or should have done to not get outmaneuvered here? I mean, is there an obvious path that he could have taken? And I'm also curious, do we know anything about how Mueller felt about how he was, in your words, submarined? Was he—do we know anything?

I mean, he's this cipher. Do we know anything about whether he was resentful of it, whether he was suspicious of it, or

he just, you know, went on his merry way?

I don't know. And it would be interesting, you know, to hear from members of his team. It would be interesting to hear from people who are personal friends of him at a time like this. I don't know if they're willing to talk

about that sort of thing. He was absolutely such a paragon of propriety and doing things by the book and by the letter of the law that he would never say how he felt about anything. But, you know, I would also say, and again, this is a little bit uncomfortable to talk about

on the occasion of his death, essentially somebody who was, especially for somebody who was such an accomplished and selfless public servant. But I feel like in the Trump era, there have been kind of three big personal reveals, like an aha

moment for the public, um, that were really consequential. One of what, one of them was really funny and two of them were tragic. The fun one was in, in Trump's first term. I don't know if you guys remember, but there was a time when the news cycle was really consumed with the fact that Trump was putting his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of everything. He was kind of a minister without portfolio in the Trump administration. He was in charge of, like, the Middle East and healthcare and COVID and the economy.

And it kind of seemed like Jared was in charge of everything, anything and everything. And maybe he was the real heavyweight. There was a lot of real mystery around, well, who is this kid? Who is this guy? Is this the real heavyweight, big brain in the administration?

And then Jared Kushner came out and did his first press availability in the first Trump term. And he walked up to the microphones and said,

sort of like, hi, I'm Jared.

And it was this personal reveal where everybody was like, oh, we don't have to worry. This is not the heavyweight. This is not the mastermind of what's going on here. That was a really important reveal. The other two were much more tragic. And one, of course, was the presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, where Joe Biden came out and appeared to be very frail and not totally in at the top of his

game, to say the least, in a way that was devastating politically to the Biden presidency and resulted in Kamala Harris being the top of the ticket for the Democrats. But I would say almost up there was the personal reveal we had from Robert Mueller in 2019, when it came time to explain his findings finally to Congress. And we opened, you guys will remember, we opened up those hearings and here was Robert Mueller, this fearsome former FBI director with this incredible, you know, sine qua non reputation.

And he was elderly and frail and halting and spoke in a way that did not convey that he necessarily had a total grasp of the facts, and he—misstatements, and a small voice, and not able to answer things at length. And I think there was a big intake of breath across the country that a lot had been sort of put on his shoulders, and maybe it wasn't the right time in his career to have done

that. Rachel, hearing you talk, I'm just struck by almost what a quaint bygone era the media landscape seems to be of the circa 2015. And then what we learn from the Russia investigation about the Russia interference and how they were using Facebook and attempting to suppress foot, stress the vote and influence operations all in the U.S. Looking at it now and looking at the media side of the story and how we covered it,

what should we have done differently? Is there anything that you would have done differently? I go back and I think about the release of the Steele dossier by BuzzFeed, which I really supported strongly at the time, and I still support. But I just wonder about it, and I wonder about the chain of events that followed and the misinformation. And I would just be curious what you make of

the aftermath. Yeah, it's a really good question, Elise. I mean, when I look back on it now, the thing that amazes me in terms of the way this story has sort of become part of our, our modern American history, become part of the way we talk about politics today, um, is thatbased, provable conclusions of a professional investigation. And so when Bill Barr and then later Trump came out and said, I was totally exonerated

by this, even today, you know, even in the obituaries that are being published today about Robert Mueller and his legacy, you will see people parrot that language about exoneration as if it was in there. Robert Mueller's report and Robert Mueller's investigation famously said—I mean, perhaps not so famously said—that Trump was not exonerated, that they were unable to exonerate him, especially of the obstruction of justice questions, which were laid out in the second volume of that

report. And the way that Trump and his team, Bill Barr in particular, were able to sort of pervert the public understanding of that very professional, very sound work, is something that was a sort of failure of intellectual synthesis. Like we as the media and we as a country were not able to hold enough nuance with those, those facts to recognize that one of those things was a statement, one of, on the one side, that was a statement of proven facts that were, you know, brought to court and the basis of, of, of indictments and tested in our adversarial legal system. And on the other

side, it was false assertions designed to muddy up those fact-based findings. And we shouldn't have given those things equal weight. But by simple repetition, insistence, and bullying and menace on Trump's side, those things came to be seen as effectively equal takes on the same set of facts. And that is a—that is a failure of synthesis. That's a failure of our ability to have a real sense

of what counts and what matters. And to this day, we live with the consequences of it.

Rachel Maddow, thank you so much for weighing in this evening. Rachel Maddow, thank you so much for weighing in this evening. It's so great to have you reflecting