Rep. Jerry Nadler Reveals Robert Mueller ‘Wants to Testify in Private’

The most highly anticipated Congressional public hearing in years may never take place, after Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) revealed to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Special Counsel Robert Mueller “wants to testify in private” about his two-year-long investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian election interference in the 2016 election.

Speaking for many Democrats who have relished the idea of Mueller answering direct questions from Congress about his exhaustive report on President Donald Trump’s conduct, Maddow simply asked “Why?”

“I don’t know why,” responded Nadler, who is the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which has been following up on discrepancies and unanswered questions from the Mueller report. “He wants — he’s willing to make an opening statement [in public], but he wants to testify in private. We’re saying he ought to — we think it’s important for the American people to hear from him and to hear his answers to questions about the report.”

Nadler went on to clarify, however, that Mueller testifying in a closed session would not preclude the release of a (presumably unclassified) transcript of his remarks.

“He envisions himself, correctly, as a man of great rectitude,” Nadler said, reading between the lines of Mueller’s request. “He doesn’t want to participate in anything that he might regard as a political spectacle, especially if Republicans on the committee start asking him questions about the beginning of the — about this stuff, the beginning of the investigation.”

A clearly frustrated Maddow pressed Nadler about whether Mueller’s subordinates on the probe would also be called to testify, noting that the president has singled some of them out by name for abuse and charges that they were politically biased against him.

“I think we probably will. I think we’ll probably hear from them and a lot of other people,” Nadler said. “Our intention is to open all of this up to the American people, to have everybody relevant testify so people understand what was in the Mueller report, what wasn’t in the Mueller report, to understand what was going on.”

But Nadler also noted that Mueller and his team’s testimony —whether public or private — would only be the tip of the iceberg in terms of Trump administration actions that his committee intends to probe.

“We will have hearings on other derelictions of duty,” Nadler explained, citing witness intimidation, dangling of pardons, legally undermining the Affordable Care Act, and the administration’s family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border among them. “All of these are abuses of power that we’re going to investigate.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.

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