Democrats to face off against a reluctant Mueller

House Democrats are facing a daunting challenge this week — goading Robert Mueller into offering testimony that could irreparably damage Donald Trump’s presidency.

In the three months since the conclusion of the former special counsel’s investigation, Democrats have struggled to use Mueller’s 448-page report to stoke a public outcry against the president's conduct, despite evidence that Trump sought to thwart the probe.

And on Wednesday, they’ll be up against a witness who didn’t want to testify in the first place — he had to be subpoenaed — and one who, over more than a decade of regular Capitol Hill testimony, has mastered the art of the dodge. For those reasons, Democrats are already downplaying expectations for the blockbuster hearings.

Still, when Mueller testifies for three hours before the House Judiciary Committee and two hours before the House Intelligence Committee, Democrats are expected to press Mueller to state that he might have charged Trump with obstruction of justice were he not the occupant of the Oval Office.

For the Democrats who want to see Trump impeached, that's the whole ballgame — and a moment that could see Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) re-think her opposition to launching a formal impeachment inquiry.

To achieve that, Democrats are aiming to bring the Mueller report off of the pages and onto Americans’ TV screens in an easily digestible format. It’s been their goal all along — but Wednesday will be their best chance to put it into practice.

“Many Americans, in their busy lives, have not had the opportunity to read the report. It’s a pretty dry, prosecutorial product,” Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation. “We want Bob Mueller to bring it to life.”

Democrats have said for months that even if Mueller simply reads aloud the words he wrote in his report, he'll debunk Trump's “no collusion, no obstruction” mantra and help Americans begin to process a report most haven’t.

Republicans, meanwhile, intend to use their time to discredit Mueller's work, arguing that he relied on a biased team of investigators who took over an active FBI investigation of Russian interference that was tainted by anti-Trump officials. Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said GOP members of the panel essentially plan to cross-examine Mueller to question his findings.

He called Mueller’s work a “one-sided report that has not been questioned by the other side,” adding: “This is our chance to do that.”

The Judiciary Committee will zero in on volume two of Mueller’s report, which lays out evidence that, in some instances, Trump’s actions may have met all of the elements necessary to charge an obstruction of justice offense.

According to aides, Democrats will focus on five of the roughly dozen episodes of potential obstruction — most notably, Trump’s direction to former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, and his subsequent order that McGahn deny that Trump ever sought to remove the special counsel. They’ll also highlight Trump’s alleged witness-tampering efforts for his former confidants Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen.

“If anyone else had been accused of what the report finds the president had done, they would’ve been indicted,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said on Fox News Sunday, adding, “The report presents very substantial evidence that the president is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Many House Democrats — and, indeed, the progressive base that has been pushing for Trump’s impeachment — are convinced that Mueller vocalizing his lengthy, dense findings will jolt complacent Americans and remake the calculus on seeking the president's ouster. And in public remarks when he formally concluded his probe, Mueller said a sitting president can only be held accountable through “a process other than the criminal justice system” due to Justice Department guidelines prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president. Many Democrats viewed that statement alone as an impeachment referral.

But the nearly 100 House Democrats advocating for impeachment proceedings know that if they slink into their six-week summer next week recess without any explosive developments from Mueller, their last best chance at gathering momentum may have slipped away.

But many Democrats, including Pelosi and her top lieutenants, oppose impeachment and aren't looking to Mueller to be the linchpin in Trump's demise. Rather, they want to see Mueller fill in part a larger mosaic of corruption, misdeeds and lies they say Trump and his allies have committed since he took office and might become the millstone that sinks his 2020 reelection bid.

Mueller, in the few words he's spoken since he launched his 22-month investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, has indicated he doesn't intend to satisfy either side of the aisle. Rather, he has pointed to his detailed report — which chronicled more than 100 contacts between Trump associates and Russian agents — and declared that the document itself is his testimony. Asking him to go beyond it, he emphasized, would be fruitless.

But the Intelligence Committee doesn’t intend to honor Mueller’s wish, according to aides. In fact, they note, his report didn't contain any of the evidence he gathered as part of a parallel counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump or his allies were compromised by Russia. And they say Mueller's insistence on discussing only his report is not a legal requirement.

“He has made it clear that he doesn’t want to go beyond the report. And I want to make it clear that that is a choice Bob Mueller is making. That is not required by law. It is not required by regulation,” Schiff said this weekend at the Aspen Security Forum, adding: “That is a choice.”

Schiff also indicated that Democrats could press Mueller to answer certain questions he might not want to engage on, but said “we will have to decide how much of our time we want to spend fighting with him to discuss things outside the report.” It’s unclear if Schiff would move to hold Mueller in contempt or seek other punitive measures.

For example, Schiff said he wants Mueller to weigh in on whether Trump should be indicted after leaving office. But he also acknowledged that Mueller would never answer that question.

“We have a far better chance of the love affair in North Korea working out, than we do of getting him to answer that question,” Schiff quipped. “But nonetheless, there are other ways of asking that question.”

On the substance, the Intelligence Committee plans to examine volume one of Mueller’s report, with a keen focus on the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia and WikiLeaks. Democrats also plan to highlight Trump’s posture toward WikiLeaks during the campaign, and whether he knew in advance about the group’s disclosures of Democratic National Committee emails.

“That ought to be damning enough. And that doesn’t require us even to go beyond the report,” Schiff said.

Democrats believe volume one of the report hasn’t received enough attention, and unlike members of the Judiciary Committee, they don't plan to spend their time questioning Mueller’s legal conclusions and prosecutorial decisions.

Though lawmakers anticipate that Mueller will testify as scheduled, the White House is closely watching the preparations, and it’s unclear if Trump himself will seek to intervene somehow.

Though Mueller, who no longer works for the Justice Department, has no obligation to obey commands from the president, the White House has repeatedly directed former employees to refuse to cooperate with congressional subpoenas — and most have honored the White House’s demands. Trump in May made a broad claim of executive privilege over Mueller's underlying evidence, which may presage an attempt to prevent Mueller from disclosing information outside the four corners of his report.

Democrats insist that they’re ready to counter any attempts by the White House to interfere with Mueller’s testimony.

“I’ve been involved in hundreds of hearings. And we have never prepared for one the way we have prepared for this one,” said a Judiciary Committee aide.

Natasha Bertrand and Bryan Bender contributed to this report.