On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” anchor Chris Wallace repeatedly pressed House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on the premise that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report had cleared President Donald Trump of “criminal collusion.”
Wallace asked, “The Justice Department says that the special counselor is not recommending any new indictments, that means that no one will have been or will have been charged with collusion with the Russians. And President Trump clearly couldn’t do that himself, so in effect, isn’t it a logical assumption that the special counsel did not find any criminal collusion with the Kremlin?”
Nadler answered, “Well, all we know is that the special counsel — all we think we know, is that the special counsel is not bringing criminal indictments for collusion.”
Nadler continued, “We do know, remember, in plain sight, of a lot of collusion. We know for example that the president’s son and his campaign manager were present at a meeting with the Russians to receive information which they were told, in the invitation was part of the Russian government’s attempt to help them in the election. We know that the campaign manager gave targeting data, political targeting data, to an agent over the Russian government.”
He added, “So, you know, we know a lot of things, and maybe it’s not indictable, but we know there was collusion. The question is to what degree and for what purpose.”
Wallace interrupted, “Excuse me, sir, that’s the point I was going to make. Kushner was not charged for that, Paul Manafort was not charged, Don Jr was not charged, so it would seem that there was no criminal collusion among them, so it would seem to clear the president on that issue.”
Nadler said, “No, it would not. The Washington Post has a story today which says that encounter intelligence investigations because of the way they are done and because of the way counterintelligence works, very often they do not lead to criminal prosecutions. But these are additional reasons we have to see the report, the entire country, the public, needs to see the entire report, so we can see what the special prosecutor says about these questions. Right now it’s very speculative.”
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