WaPo:
The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing next week on the Mueller report — but the report’s author will not attend.
The panel announced Monday that it will convene on June 10 for a hearing titled “Lessons from the Mueller Report: Presidential Obstruction and Other Crimes.”
Former U.S. attorneys and legal experts are expected to attend, as is John W. Dean III, the former White House counsel under President Richard M. Nixon who accused Nixon of being directly involved in the Watergate coverup and later served four months in prison for obstruction of justice.
But Robert S. Mueller III, the now-former special counsel who led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, is not expected to testify, according to the committee.
“Given the threat posed by the president’s alleged misconduct, our first hearing will focus on President Trump’s most overt acts of obstruction. In the coming weeks, other hearings will focus on other important aspects of the Mueller report,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.
John Dean? That’s great for history buffs like me, but it really doesn’t move the ball. Having the hearings on the Mueller Report without Mueller is like…. having hearings on the Mueller Report without Mueller.
Get him in there!
On the other hand, having hearings will continue to enlighten a rather stupid unengaged public:
A guy on my flight was surprised to see that I had this — didn’t realize the report had been released, much less published.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) June 3, 2019
As damning as it is — and wow, it is — Democrats can’t just assume the public knows what’s in it. https://t.co/X6LwBj26Ja
A key witness in former Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian election interference has been indicted by federal officials on child pornography charges, according to court documents.
George Nader, who had a previous criminal record on such charges, was charged in federal court in Virginia, and is expected to make an initial court appearance in New York.
Nader played an unusual role as a kind of liaison between Trump supporters, Middle East leaders, and Russians interested in making contact with the incoming administration in early 2017.
Nader was known to Trump associates as someone with political connections in the Middle East who could help them navigate the diplomacy of the region.
He helped arrange a meeting in the Seychelles in January 2017 between Erik Prince, a Trump supporter who founded the private security firm Blackwater, and a Russian official close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The purpose of the meeting was of particular interest to Mueller’s investigators, and some questions about it remain unanswered, even after Mueller issued a 448-page report on his findings.
A Lebanese American businessman, Nader was stopped by federal agents when he arrived at Dulles International Airport in January 2018. He was served with a subpoena, and eventually cooperated with authorities, providing grand jury testimony about his interactions with Trump supporters, according to people familiar with the matter.
Prince has insisted, both publicly and to Congress, that his meeting in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian government-controlled wealth fund, was a chance encounter that occurred because he happened to be meeting with United Arab Emirates officials at a luxury hotel in the Indian Ocean nation.At the time, Nader had been working for years as an adviser to the UAE. Nader told investigators it was a meeting planned in advance, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Nader was convicted 28 years ago of transporting child pornography, a case in which he received a reduced sentence after influential figures argued privately to the court that he was playing a valuable role in national security affairs — trying to free U.S. hostages then held in Lebanon.