美国国家公共电台 NPR McConnell Says He Supports Mueller Investigation

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Today began with the news that President Trump¹ was canceling his upcoming summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. A couple of hours later, congressional leaders sat down with senior intelligence and Justice Department officials for classified briefings. The White House set up these meetings so lawmakers could see documents related to a confidential² FBI source who met with Trump campaign officials early on in the Russia investigation³. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was in that briefing. And as soon as he left, McConnell sat down with NPR's congressional team, Susan Davis and Kelsey Snell, for an interview. Here's some of what McConnell had to say.

SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE⁴: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, thank you for sitting down with us today.

MITCH MCCONNELL: Yeah.

DAVIS: First, obviously, we want to start with the meeting you just had with Justice Department officials and whether anything you learned today at the briefing has led you to question your stated existing confidence in both the Justice Department and special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

MCCONNELL: Well, as you know before I tell you, it was a classified briefing, and consequently I don't really have any observations to make about it.

DAVIS: So there's nothing coming out of that that has changed your past statements?

MCCONNELL: I don't have anything new to say on that subject.

DAVIS: On North Korea, the other news of the day, does the administration's sort of whiplash decision-making when it comes to North Korea do you think in any way undermines the U.S.'s ability to negotiate a longer-term peace deal to denuclearize Korea?

MCCONNELL: I don't see any whiplash here. I think the president did exactly the right thing because they were playing with us. And there's been a pattern of that going back a couple of generations. So the president did exactly the right thing in canceling the meeting.

DAVIS: What happens next?

MCCONNELL: That will be up to the North Koreans.

DAVIS: You don't see any role for Congress here?

MCCONNELL: No, I don't. This is all a negotiation⁵ handled by the executive branch. I think the administration's handling it positively⁶. And, you know, we've seen this North Korean act, as I said, through two generations. And I think the president's right. The ball is in the North Koreans' court, and we'll see what happens next.

KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: To move things back to this building here in Congress, the House is going to try again - or if they are going to try again to pass an immigration bill in June and they can pass something, would that revive your interest in doing something in immigration here in the Senate?

MCCONNELL: Well, as you may recall, we went to the floor for a whole week, wide open for amendments⁸, back in February and were unable to pass anything here in the Senate. If the House were able to pass an immigration bill that the president indicated he would sign and we would actually potentially make a law, I'd be open to considering it. But I'm not interested in just having another wide-open debate that leads to nothing. So we'll have to wait and see what the House does.

SNELL: That's a fairly high bar. The president has spoken about this several times saying that he needs money for the wall, that he needs certain border security measures and a number of things that likely couldn't pass here in the Senate with Democrat⁹ support. Is that - I mean, are you effectively ruling out the possibility of doing a bipartisan immigration bill?

MCCONNELL: I'm not ruling anything in or out. I'm telling you that if the House passes a bill that the president indicates he would sign, then I'd be willing to consider it again even though I gave the Senate every opportunity without any restrictions¹⁰, wide open for amendment⁷, and we couldn't pass anything. So I'm not going to do that again. I can tell you that.

DAVIS: I have to make one more attempt at this because I just have to. I know that you can't talk about classified information or briefings, and I'm not asking you to. But there is a real question about, can the public continue to have faith that the Justice Department is acting¹¹ honorably and within the law, particularly when people including the president of the United States is suggesting that there is real malfeasance here inside the FBI?

MCCONNELL: The two investigations¹² going on that I think will give us the answers to the questions that you raised - the IG investigation in the Justice Department and the Mueller investigation - I support both of them. And I don't really have anything to add to this subject based upon the Gang of Eight briefing that we had today, which was classified.

SNELL: Thank you, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Thank you for your time.

MCCONNELL: OK, thank you.

SHAPIRO: That was Senator Mitch McConnell speaking with NPR's Susan Davis and Kelsey Snell. And Kelsey's with us now from the Capitol. Hi there.

SNELL: Hi.

SHAPIRO: How important is it that McConnell told you he supports both the Mueller investigation and the inspector¹³ general?

SNELL: That is pretty important. And we should be clear that McConnell really has never shared the skepticism of some conservatives about these investigations. And that sometimes leaves him in an uncomfortably lonely place on this. He is the most prominent Republican in Congress supporting Mueller at a time when conservatives are making aggressive efforts to undermine the FBI, Mueller and the DOJ. And that is a really politically risky¹⁴ place sometimes because Trump's very engaged and fervent¹⁵ base is at odds¹⁶ with McConnell on this position.

And McConnell needs those people to show up and vote in the midterm elections because something else we talked about later in the interview is that McConnell's trying to keep control of the Senate for Republicans. And he needs those voters, those Trump voters, to come and help that happen.

SHAPIRO: I know you sat down with Senator McConnell for about 15 minutes. We heard a few minutes of it there. What else did you discuss?

SNELL: Well, we talked about a wide-ranging thing because this is kind of a common thing that McConnell does. He does these interviews at the end of the spring term when he's heading out into summer to talk about his big victories. And it's clear that he has had a lot of victories here. They have approved a lot of judges, a lot of conservative judges. The president is signing bills that they are passing on deregulation and veterans. But a lot of those are, you know, significant, real victories for conservatives but things that keep getting overshadowed by Russia and the Russian investigation. And that is clearly frustrating¹⁷ for McConnell. You could hear it in that interview there.

SHAPIRO: Yeah. He also discussed immigration, as we heard, which has come up as something that maybe Congress could take up again before November. But he set a pretty high bar there. Do you think that makes it less likely that Congress would vote on immigration this summer?

SNELL: To kind of remind people about where we are right now, the House is in a bind¹⁸. There are conservatives who want a conservative bill to be voted on, and there are moderates who are circulating a petition that would force votes on some more, you know, bipartisan solutions. Now, they haven't gotten to that point yet. But if something were to pass the House that is more bipartisan, what McConnell is essentially¹⁹ saying there is that it couldn't pass in the Senate, and he wouldn't bring it up because he wants the president's support. And the president isn't going to support the kind of bipartisan bill that would, you know, give protections to DACA recipients²⁰ without funding the wall. It's a complicated situation where this is as close as we're going to get to a flat no from McConnell on immigration.

SHAPIRO: So here we are in a midterm year, and there's been a lot of analysis from people about whether Republicans can hold onto their Senate majority. Did you get a sense that McConnell expects to be the majority leader in the next Congress?

SNELL: McConnell said - and he has said this a lot before - that he is - he fears that the Senate might be in play. But he said that they're going to go out there, and they're going to do a lot of campaigning. And they're hoping that the president will help them with that. That's something that we talked about a lot, is that his hope is that the president will do more to help campaign and promote those victories we talked about earlier.

SHAPIRO: NPR's Kelsey Snell speaking about her sit-down with NPR's Susan Davis interviewing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Thanks so much, Kelsey.

SNELL: Thank you so much.