THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019 15
COMMENT
LOSTINTRANSLATION
O
ne function of the testimony that
Robert Mueller, the special coun-
sel who oversaw the investigation into
Russian interference in the 2016 elec-
tion, delivered before two House com-
mittees last week was to illustrate how
various factions in Washington have
come to speak different languages. The
words may be the same, but the mean-
ings are not. “Un-American,” in the lex-
icon of Representative Denny Heck,
Democrat of Washington, describes
people in Donald Trump’s orbit who
seek to cash in on their positions when
dealing with Russians. For Represen-
tative Guy Reschenthaler, Republican
of Pennsylvania, “un-American” means
Mueller’s decision to include in his in-
vestigation’s report so much negative
information about a man “who hap-
pens to be the President of the United
States.” It’s hardly a wonder that Muel-
ler occasionally appeared confused. Each
time the questioning swung between
the Democrats and the Republicans, he
had to switch vernaculars.
More than that, Mueller had to nav-
igate two different narrative realms. In
the one more grounded in his report,
Democrat after Democrat argued that,
if Trump were not the President, he
would have been charged with obstruc-
tion of justice. In an exchange with
Representative Ted Lieu, of Califor-
nia, Mueller briefly appeared to agree
that a Justice Department legal opin-
ion that precludes charging a sitting
President was all that had stopped him
from doing so—but later clarified that,
because of that opinion, he never got
to the point of deciding whether an
indictment was merited.
Meanwhile, the excitable Jim Jor-
dan, Republican of Ohio, demanded
to know why Mueller had charged “thir-
teen Russians no one’s ever heard of ”
but not “the guy who puts the coun-
try through this whole saga!” He meant
not Donald Trump but Joseph Mifsud,
whom he identified as a “mysterious
professor who works in Rome and Lon-
don,” and a key figure in the theory,
popular on Fox News, that the Trump
campaign’s alleged Russia contacts were
actually just a cleverly engineered setup.
As Jordan berated Mueller, he pro-
claimed what he called “the good news”:
Attorney General William Barr is on
the case. This was a reference to Barr’s
commitment to an inquiry by Michael
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Horowitz, the Department of Justice’s
inspector general, of the counterintel-
ligence investigation into the Trump
campaign that the F.B.I. opened in
2016, and Barr’s appointment of John
Durham, the Connecticut U.S. Attor-
ney, to review the whole affair. The
Wall Street Journal said that “Barr will
never have a more important assign-
ment” than pursuing the matter. Lind-
sey Graham, who chairs the Senate Ju-
diciary Committee, has also pledged
to hold hearings.
Among other things, Horowitz’s in-
vestigation concerns how officials han-
dled a dossier assembled by Christo-
pher Steele, a former British intelligence
agent with experience in Russia, who
was working for a company called Fu-
sion GPS, which had been retained by
a law firm hired by Hillary Clinton’s
campaign and the Democratic National
Committee. The dossier relates some
wild claims—for instance, that “knowl-
edgeable sources” said the Russians had
compromising sexual material on
Trump—which have never been sub-
stantiated. The thesis on the Trump
side is that the dossier was a Russian
disinformation operation, in which
Clinton was complicit; in other words,
that’s the real collusion.
Mueller, citing the Justice Depart-
ment’s continuing inquiries, said that
the dossier was “beyond my purview,”
which only further incensed his ques-
tioners. So central has the dossier be-
come to the Republican narrative of
Trump’s victimhood that, when Muel-
ler appeared slow to recognize the name
Fusion GPS, some Fox News figures
