AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Joining us now to talk through what the release of the report means for the president is NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Hey, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: So it sounds like the president is pretty happy. But it’s not like there wasn’t unflattering and potentially damaging information about him in this report. Let’s talk about that.
LIASSON: Well, there’s a lot of damaging information. First of all, Mueller established that Russia interfered in the election, something the president still hasn’t consistently accepted. The very embarrassing scene that you just described, where Trump finds out there’s a special counsel investigating him, and he says, I’m F-ed – expletive deleted.
CHANG: Yeah.
LIASSON: Then there was the vindication of the fake news; turned out fake news was real news. Mueller actually corroborated several news reports that the president has called fake – one of them where he asked his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to order the deputy attorney general to fire Bob Mueller, which he didn’t do, or the Mueller report validated news reports that show the president dictating the false statement about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians. So there is a lot of embarrassing material; unclear if it will be anything in the report that will change the political dynamic in a major way because people are so locked in about their views about the president.
CHANG: Yeah, it sounds like the partisan reaction so far has been pretty predictable.
LIASSON: Yes. Trump and the Republicans are sticking to the no collusion, no obstruction message. Democrats are upset; they feel the report is more damning than Attorney General Barr’s description of it. The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, said that Congress will continue to investigate the president. Here’s what he said today.
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