CBS anchor confronts Bidens attorney with important question that crumbles his narrative about the special counsel report | Jim Fetzer
Summary
Transcript
And we’re joined now by President Biden’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration. He’s also married to Biden. White House senior advisor Anita Dunn. Welcome and good to talk to you in person. Thank you. Glad to be here. So the special counsel determined no prosecution should happen in regard to the mishandling of classified information. This was a decision in your favor, but you asked the special counsel to reevaluate what you called, quote, highly prejudicial language.
Did anyone appeal directly to Attorney General Garland or the Justice Department on that point? Well, we made submissions in paper on those points, but let me just take a step back. The special counsel to the special counsel, and we reiterated them again on paper to the attorney general, because this is a report that went off the rails, a shabby work product. Let’s take a step back. It starts with a legal conclusion that was foregone from the very beginning.
The investigation could have been concluded in two or three months. It went on for over 15 months. And so along with the legal conclusion comes this flood of characterizations, factual misstatements, pejorative comments about the president that are inconsistent with DOJ policy and norms, and that, as you see over the last 48 hours, have been widely criticized by legal experts. This is not what prosecutors do. It is shoddy work product.
But it was the attorney general’s commitment to make this public that put this in this space. Did you ever ask the Justice Department not to make it public? No. Or consider doing so? No. And what did the attorney general say when you raised these issues to him? It’s evident that he had committed to make the report public the way that the special counsel had written it. And so that’s the report that we have because he did not release any additional letter or anything.
Did the attorney general essentially endorse this work product? I won’t speak for the attorney general’s views. I can simply say that the arguments that we made about the inconsistency of this report with basic norm, setting aside the foregone, clear legal conclusion in the president’s favor, the failures of this report that we brought up did not ultimately change the outcome. So in terms of Justice Department policy, things are different in terms of regulation for a special counsel.
And I want to ask you specifically about what I think you’re referring to as pejorative comments. You’re specifically talking about what the language here from heard that the president didn’t remember when he was vice president. He forgot the first day of the interview when his term ended. When did I stop being vice president? He forgot the second day of the interview, when his term began, and within several years could not recall when his son Bo died.
Is that specifically the part that you think is pejorative? That’s among the problems with the work product. Again, I’m taking it outside the legal analysis, which was foregone, incorrect. I’m taking it to misstatements of fact and commentary that’s totally inappropriate, including the comments that you’re referring to. Okay, so when you say misstatements of fact, you were in the room. I was. For this deposition over two days, 5 hours.
Correct. Did the president have problems recalling details? I recall from that interview a president who engaged with the questions very directly and gave his best recollection and in fact, I think was quite helpful to the special counsel, who elsewhere in the report actually cites his compelling and forceful one piece of that testimony. Let me tell you, a striking sort of vignette, as I recall it from the interview.
The special counsel opens by thanking the president for making the scheduled appointment. It could have been rescheduled given international events. And he makes a point of saying, we’re grateful that knowing what else is going on in the world, that you kept the appointment, should it have been rescheduled? And then he proceeds, I’ll address that question as well. Then he proceeds to say, I’m going to be taking you through events that are many years ago.
He flags that. So all I can ask is your best recollection. And that is precisely what the president did. He engaged. He answered the questions. And the special counsel’s decision to cherry pick in a very misleading way, some of the references that you’re discussing here is an example of what I call a really shabby work product and completely out of bounds for a prosecutor. I should mention also, Margaret, the special counsel rules do not exempt the special counsel from DOJ norms and policies.
In fact, they specifically hold the special counsel to DOJ norms and policies. So what you’re talking about and letters you’ve released make it sound like there are indeed transcripts that you have of these conversations over the eigth and the 9th. Yes, I’m drawing here on my recollections, but yes, there are transcripts. And as you heard, Ian, Sam’s in the press briefing room say there are discussions underway because it’s a classified document about what could or whether will be or when released.
I can’t add anything to that today. Do you favor releasing them? Well, it’s really a decision that has to take place within the government, it’s a classified document. I’m the president’s personal counsel. Right. Would you recommend that these be made public if they indeed back up your personal record again? There’s a process underway. I’m not a specialist in that process. And so I really have to defer to those who have to work through those issues.
Okay. Because just this past week alone, the president, in public remarks, mixed up the leaders of France, Germany, and he referred to Egypt as Mexico. Does the president have any memory problems? He does not. I was in the interview room, and let me tell you one other vignette from the interview room. There were a couple of occasions when the special counsel who had flagged at the beginning that sometimes he asks imprecise questions, asked questions that the president picked apart as a matter of logic.
He showed that the questions didn’t have a logical underpinning. Now, everybody in the room recognized that was the case. It showed the president was listening carefully and understood precisely what was wrong with those questions. I didn’t come away from the special counsel’s failure to ask precise questions and think to myself, he has mental acuity problems. I just thought he was asking bad questions. So the vice president accused the special counsel of being clearly politically motivated.
What evidence do you have to back up that assertion? What I was concerned about in the course of this investigation is that we had a special counsel who had one eye on the foregone legal conclusions and one eye on the inevitable storm from members of his own party when he had to conclude that the president had not broken the law. So you have to wonder, with those pressures impinging on the investigation from the outside, knowing the attacks the Republicans had levied on the law enforcement process, did he decide we would have to ask, that he would reach the only legal conclusion possible and then toss in the rest of it to placate a certain political constituency.
The special counsel has been praised in the past by democratic senators from his home state of Maryland. And I know when the president took office, he said he wants to restore the honor, integrity, and independence of the DOJ. Doesn’t leveling these charges of being politically motivated do the same thing Donald Trump does when he says that the system’s rigged? That’s not what we’re saying. Nobody’s arguing on our side.
I’m not arguing that the system is rigged. We’re looking at this particular performance by this particular special counsel in this particular case. And as legal experts around the country are saying, it just goes off the rails. It’s a shabby piece of work. He arrived at the right legal conclusion and then 400 page laters, misstatements of facts, and totally inappropriate and pejorative comments that are unfounded and not supported by the record.
The president blamed his aides even though he also said, I guess I wanted to hang on to some of these documents for posterity’s sake. Were any of his aides punished for what the president said is their fault? Security. The president say that mistakes were made in the packing and shipping of materials during the transition, and he wished he had feedback on it. He had spent more time looking into it.
He was course busy. He was continuing to be the vice president of the United States. I don’t know that blaming his aides, other than assigning the responsibility where it lay with the staff is what the president had in mind. He was saying staff was clearly involved, responsible for the packing. We don’t see presidents and vice presidents during transitions packing boxes. But he recognizes now when he looks back on it, maybe more involvement on his part was necessary because it didn’t go the way he thought it should have gone.
But specific to the documents related to Afghanistan, he did say he might have hung onto it for posterity’s sake. Not that an aide. Hang on, Margaret, you’re referring, to be clear, and this is again a result of a report that was written in a particularly shabby and shoddy way, he’s referring to a personal handwritten memorandum to the president of the United States. President Obama. His own personal handwritten memorandum that even the special counsel acknowledges was one that he would not have thought would include classified information.
He thought it was a sensitive, private document, as were all his conversations with President Obama. But that’s what it was, his own personal written memo to the president on a policy issue. And I might add, his position on that was well known. Well known. Yes. I’m told we have to leave it here, but Bob Bauer, thank you for coming. It’s a pleasure. Thank you very much. And making the case.
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