elections

The controversial former judge says the president ‘doesn’t control’ Alabama voters, and he can win despite Trump’s opposition.

A defiant Roy Moore brushed aside Donald Trump’s warning not to run for Senate again, telling POLITICO on Wednesday that Alabama voters are capable of deciding for themselves whether he’s fit for office.

“The president doesn’t control who votes for the United States Senate in Alabama,” Moore said in a phone interview. “People in Alabama are smarter than that. They elect the senator from Alabama, not from Washington, D.C.”

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The scandal-plagued former judge said he is “seriously considering” running for Senate again and plans to decide in a “few weeks.”

Moore’s recalcitrance comes as Republicans, including Trump, are warning him to stay out of the race against Democratic Sen. Doug Jones. Republicans view the Alabama contest as a linchpin of their Senate majority — ousting Jones in 2020 would give the GOP a larger cushion with the party mostly on defense on the Senate map.

Jones narrowly defeated Moore in a special election in 2017 amid allegations of sexual misconduct by Moore with young girls decades ago. Those allegations emerged after Moore won the GOP nomination by defeating the Trump-endorsed candidate, then-interim Sen. Luther Strange.

Trump tweeted Wednesday morning that he has “NOTHING” against Moore, despite the sexual misconduct allegations against the former judge. But, he wrote, Moore “cannot win, and the consequences will be devastating.” That came after Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., also tweeted at Moore to steer clear of the race.

Top allies to Senate Republican leadership have made clear they view Moore as the best chance Democrats have to maintain the seat.

“We believe most Alabama Republicans realize that nominating Roy Moore would be gift wrapping this Senate seat for Chuck Schumer,” said Steven Law, president of Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Moore is convinced he could capture his party’s nomination in the face of the president’s opposition again. He said some Republicans are fearful that he still has support in the state.

“They know I’ll win,” he said. “That’s why they’re upset.”

He also continues to deny the multiple allegations of inappropriate behavior against him that were reported on during the 2017 race. “It was fake news then, [and] it’s fake news now,” Moore said.

Republicans have believed for weeks that Moore was likely to run for Senate again. They also acknowledge there’s little they can do to stop him, and that he has a hard-core base of supporters in the state that likely gives him both a high floor and low ceiling of support. Alabama election laws require winning a majority of the vote to secure a party nomination, so Moore could have an opening to make a runoff in a crowded primary field.

Opposition to his potential candidacy has been fairly unified throughout the party. Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, had spoken with Trump in recent weeks and raised concerns about Moore, according to two people familiar with the discussion.

Trump’s tweet Wednesday was widely praised by Republicans, who believe the president is uniquely able to chip away at Moore’s support given his popularity among the GOP base in deep-red Alabama.

The dynamics of the race “were different before the president weighed in, but they’re fundamentally changed after the president weighed in,” said Josh Holmes, a top McConnell adviser. “I don’t think Roy Moore could win a primary before the president weighed in, and I know he can’t win one after the president weighed in.”

With or without Moore, the GOP contest appears wide open. Several Republicans are already running: Rep. Bradley Byrne, state Rep. Arnold Mooney, and Tommy Tuberville, the former head football coach at Auburn University.

Each of the candidates face hurdles to emerging from the field. Byrne, the first candidate in the race, had more than $2 million in the bank at the end of the first quarter. Though a potential problem looms: Byrne called on Trump to step aside from the presidential race in 2016 after the “Access Hollywood” tape. Though he eventually said he would vote for Trump and has been a staunch supporter since the president took office, it’s unclear whether he can clear the hurdles of his previous criticism.

Tuberville, meanwhile, has put together a strong campaign team of veteran consultants, but he’s a first-time candidate without experience as a campaigner or fundraiser. Mooney, a staunch conservative, already earned the endorsement of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) — but as a state representative, he also faces a battle to prove fundraising ability and broader support.

Leaders of the conservative Club for Growth are watching the race closely and have met with Mooney and Tuberville, who could both receive a major boost from an endorsement. The group opposes Byrne and would not back Moore if he does run. David McIntosh, the Club president, said they had “good meetings” with both Mooney and Tuberville.

“We are waiting to see if either put together a great campaign and raise the money necessary to be competitive,” McIntosh said.

If Moore does run, as appears likely, Republicans’ goal would be to defeat him outright and deny him a spot in a runoff. But given his potentially unshakable base of support in the state, some Republicans acknowledge it’s possible he could make a runoff again as he did in 2017. One Republican working on the race, who requested anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said polling had shown about 15 percent of the primary electorate views Moore “very” favorably. This Republican said in a crowded field, Moore would be unlikely to grow his support beyond that.

A second Republican involved in the race, however, said Moore has a “hard-core following” that could put him in a runoff. This Republican emphasized that Trump’s opposition would likely mean any opponent could defeat him one-on-one, but Moore making a runoff is a potentially disastrous scenario for Republicans given the unpredictability of those matchups.

“I think it’s a disaster if it’s misplayed,” this Republican said.

National Republicans are not yet picking a candidate to back, and the state GOP is staying out of the primary. Terry Lathan, the state party chair, said in a statement that they will remain neutral: “It is up to the candidates to make their case to the Republican primary voters to secure their support.”

The primary, set for next March, is still far away. The filing deadline is in December, leaving plenty of time for other candidates to enter the race. Even as the other candidates build their campaigns, Republicans in Washington plan to bash Moore, if he runs, as unelectable not just for the allegations of sexual misconduct, but for the other controversies in his past, including being twice removed from the state Supreme Court.

“Last time around was a sprint. This is a marathon,” said Jesse Hunt, a spokesperson for the NRSC. “Roy Moore has proven he’s incapable of winning a general election, and no stone will be left unturned as it pertains to his background.”

Alex Isenstadt contributed to this report.

MUELLER INVESTIGATION

Trump and his aides were far more careful than usual to say that Barr — not Mueller — cleared the president in the Russia probe.

It’s been a constant refrain for President Donald Trump since the April 19 release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report: “No collusion, no obstruction,” Trump has said and tweeted dozens of times.

But Mueller’s dramatic public statement on Wednesday was a powerful reminder, perhaps even to the White House, that Trump’s past comments were misleading at best.

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In concluding remarks before formally leaving his post after more than two years, Mueller made clear on Wednesday that he did not determine that Trump hadn’t obstructed justice, and that “if we had had confidence the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so.”

It was far from the “total exoneration” that Trump has repeatedly — and falsely — claimed.

The renewed attention Mueller drew to his findings also seemed to produce a subtle change from Trump and his allies. They were mostly careful not to assert that Mueller had cleared Trump outright. It seemed a retreat from more definitive statements, and a recognition that Mueller’s spoken words would have more resonance than his dense 448-page official report.

Trump acknowledged the distinction between the exoneration he has claimed in the past and Mueller’s far less forgiving findings when he responded via Twitter on Wednesday that there was “insufficient evidence” in Mueller’s report to show he obstructed justice and that, “therefore,” he is “innocent.”

It was an unusually mild framing by Trump, who often insists that he did nothing wrong in the Russia probe and that accusations against him are simply made up.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later issued a statement noting that Mueller’s “report was clear — there was no collusion, no conspiracy — and the Department of Justice confirmed there was no obstruction.” In what seemed like an act of coordination, Trump’s campaign echoed that language, saying, “There was no case for obstruction.”

The change from “no collusion, no obstruction” to “no collusion, no conspiracy” was a striking shift for a White House whose rhetoric has been consistent until now. It also included more nuance about the possibility that Trump had legally obstructed Mueller’s probe than most of their previous assertions.

Not in every case, to be sure: the statement from Trump’s campaign did repeat the assertion that “President Trump has been fully and completely exonerated.”

But Trump aides and allies generally offered clearer-than-usual acknowledgments that it was Attorney General William Barr, and not Mueller, who made the determination that Trump did not obstruct justice — even as prosecutors investigated 11 instances in which the president tried to hamper the Russia probe.

Barr has said that Mueller’s report does not provide the basis for charging Trump with obstruction, in part because Trump did not commit the underlying crime of conspiring with the Kremlin to interfere with the 2016 election.

But Democrats call Barr’s defense of Trump inherently suspect given that the president appointed him to the job of attorney general, and say the conclusions of Mueller, a Republican former FBI director who owes nothing to Trump, should carry far more weight.

“The response from Trump and his aides on Wednesday appeared to recognize that the Mueller-led Justice Department investigation into whether the Trump campaign worked with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election is now closed and that they need to work more clearly to try to influence lawmakers on Capitol Hill.”

“If Mueller did not recommend prosecution and the two top DOJ officials” — namely, Barr and his then-deputy, Rod Rosenstein — “concluded that there is insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge, then the House will have to impeach Trump either on the basis that all the prosecutors were wrong or on another basis,” said Jan Witold Baran, a Republican lawyer specializing in government ethics.

But Sanders told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that Trump had not changed his response.

“We’ve been saying the same thing for two years, before the Mueller investigation even had to start,” she said. “We knew there was no collusion, we knew there was no conspiracy and there’s been no obstruction. We’ve been explicitly clear in that. I think I’ve probably said that phrase no less than a thousand times standing right here in this very spot. The message hasn’t changed at all.”

Trump’s responses are always shorter, more unequivocal and more exorbitant than his aides official statements in part because he relies on Twitter shorthand. But within minutes of his statement, Trump, the White House and Trump campaign responded in similar ways.

Jay Sekulow, Trump’s lawyer, also said in a statement that the investigation “produced no findings of collusion or obstruction against the president,” although he was careful to attribute that determination to Barr, not Mueller himself.

“The attorney general conclusively determined that there was no obstruction by the president,” he said. “In the words of Attorney General Barr: ‘The report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct.”

Mueller’s statement that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to accuse a president of wrongdoing led some members of Congress to announce that they want to further investigate.

“The ball is in our court, Congress,” tweeted Justin Amash, the lone Republican lawmaker pushing for impeachment proceedings.

Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor, said Trump and his aides appeared to be speaking to those lawmakers mulling impeachment proceedings and that the change in language is not for legal reasons, but political ones.

“They want to give cover to anyone who wasn’t sure about impeachment,” he said. “Their hope is the attorney general’s opinion carries weight… He’s not just any guy. He’s the attorney general of the United States.”

That strategy is unlikely to work with some lawmakers. House Democrats have already accused Barr of acting more like Trump’s personal attorney than the U.S. attorney general and threatened to hold him in contempt for failing to release Mueller’s full report and underlying evidence.

More Coverage: Full transcript of Mueller’s statement on the Russia investigation| Mueller’s full statement on the Russia investigation| I Watched 20 Hours of Robert Mueller Testifying. Here’s What Congress Would Be In For.

justice department

Democrats and some Republicans saw a statement that ‘contradicts’ and even ‘rebuke[s]’ Trump’s attorney general.

Moments after Robert Mueller gave brief concluding remarks about his Russia probe on Wednesday, the former Republican New Jersey governor and sometime Trump adviser Chris Christie declared that the special counsel’s statement “definitely contradicts what the attorney general said when he summarized Mueller’s report.”

Christie wasn’t alone. The Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff called Mueller’s statement a “direct rebuke of Attorney General William Barr,” arguing that Barr had “deliberately and repeatedly misled the American people.” And while she didn’t mention Barr by name, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was “greatly disappointed with the Department of Justice for their misrepresentation of the Mueller report.”

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Even though Mueller’s remarks focused on his findings about Russian election meddling and whether President Donald Trump obstructed his probe, it was clear that he had also thrown the klieg lights back on to his old friend Barr — rekindling anger over suspicions that Trump’s attorney general has been carrying water for the president.

And if Mueller was not engaging directly in a food fight, cable news networks did the job for him, playing side-by-side reels of Mueller and Barr’s seemingly conflicting statements nearly all of Wednesday afternoon.

Wittingly or not, Mueller spotlighted differences with Barr on several points. While Barr stated in his April news conference that there was “no evidence of collusion,” Mueller said Wednesday he found “insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.” And while Mueller gave a nod to Congress when he said that “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing,” Barr said he hoped Mueller hadn’t intended to leave the decision to Congress “since we don’t convene grand juries and conduct criminal investigations for that purpose.”

Those differences will help to ensure that Barr continues to be a central figure for the remainder of Trump’s term, a boogeyman to liberals who have called for his impeachment, and an increasing favorite of the president, who has long wanted a loyal attorney general and cheered Barr as he has initiated an investigation of the FBI’s Russia investigation.

Perhaps the most significant divergence between Barr and Mueller, who are longtime friends, dating back to their service at the Department of Justice during the George H.W. Bush administration, came on the explosive question of a potential indictment of Trump for obstructing justice. In Mueller’s telling, a Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted guided his investigation and informed his decision not to reach a conclusion about whether Trump obstructed justice. Charging the president with a crime was “not an option,” Mueller said, and accusing him of committing one when he could not try the case in court, Mueller added, violated what he considered “principles of fairness.”

Mueller said nothing that wasn’t in his report, which was publicly released on April 18. But many political and legal observers were struck by the emphasis he placed on his reasoning behind not bringing obstruction charges against Trump, and his assertion that if his team “had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

“He devoted a third of his only public statement to explaining why the office didn’t charge the president with obstruction, which I think tells you something that was important both to clarify because he thought was important but also for the American public to understand,” said a former White House official interviewed by the special counsel’s office.

Barr, however, seemed to leave a different impression in his own public statements. Speaking to reporters before the release of Mueller’s report in April, and again to lawmakers earlier this month, Barr said Mueller had told him the DOJ policy was not the chief reason he did not charge the president with a crime. “Special counsel Mueller stated three times to us … that he emphatically was not saying that but for the OLC opinion he would have found obstruction,” Barr told a Senate panel in early May. OLC, or the Office of Legal Counsel, is the Justice Department office whose legal guidance has typically been used to mediate between government agencies.

That may technically be true. But Barr’s critics insisted Wednesday that it was a misleading characterization, one that gave the impression that Mueller had said the evidence did not support indicting Trump. Schiff’s statement insisted that Mueller “made clear that, because of the Department’s own policy, it is left it to Congress — not the attorney general — to evaluate and further investigate the president’s misconduct.”

Mueller allies said they thought the special counsel was seeking to clarify why he declined to reach a conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice rather than to pick a fight with the attorney general.

“When I looked at his report there was one section that was open to interpretation,” said Philip Mudd, who worked closely with Mueller during his tenure as FBI director. “I think he looked at that and said, ‘I’m going to clarify that in 8, 9, 10 minutes.’ And that’s what he did. I don’t think Mueller is interested in a ‘He said, she said.’”

It’s not the first indication of tension between the two.

Mueller on Wednesday referred obliquely to a March 27 letter he had sent Barr, after the attorney general first announced his conclusions about Mueller’s then-unreleased report, urging the immediate release of executive summaries of it.

But Mueller seemed to backpedal from any confrontation over the issue by expressing his appreciation for Barr’s decision to make public the vast majority of the report. Mueller also said that he wasn’t questioning Barr’s “good faith” in deciding to wait until a more complete version of the report was ready for release.