Also a pathological liar
Jeffrey Toobin on why Mueller’s approach was such a disaster, starting with the failure to make Trump testify:
Trump was the protagonist of this entire affair. He’s also a pathological liar, and he is someone whose perspective, if you want to call it that, was indispensable to resolving what really went on here, what Trump was thinking, what his intent was in a legal sense. So the failure to have his voice in the Mueller report and in Mueller’s determinations about what to do with the information he gathered left, I thought, a massive hole in the investigation…
The written questions were basically a joke. They were essentially written by the lawyers, and lawyers, doing what lawyers do, answered the questions in such ways that they could not be proven false. So there were an abundance of “I don’t knows” and “I don’t remembers” and “I can’t recalls.”…
So the written questions were practically useless. What would have been different in oral questions is that Trump would have done what he always does, which is lie extravagantly. Trump can’t help himself. That’s how he behaves. His narcissism and his incredible dishonesty when it comes to anything related to things of importance to him would have come through. And that’s an indispensable part of this story, and we know that because so much of what he said publicly about the Russia matter and later the Ukraine matter was so obviously false.
Mueller doesn’t like politics.
Mueller … found it deeply distasteful that he became a political figure. He did not want to be the case against Trump from the Democratic perspective. He didn’t like that there were Robert Mueller action figures. He didn’t like that there were “Mueller Time” T-shirts and that he became, you know, the hope and dream of MSNBC. This was not how Mueller saw himself. I think there was this institutional resistance, which Mueller fostered, of becoming a political figure. And I think that contributed to his just-the-facts report, and his reluctance to draw conclusions. I think that was a flawed approach. But it comes out of Mueller’s background as someone who was deeply suspicious of the political process.
But Giuliani is political as hell and he won.
It is what it is.
I recall that one of his lawyers basically told him that to his face when he was saying he wanted to testify.
I cannot recommend Sarah Kendzior’s Hiding in Plain Sight enough. She talks about how Muller is a symptom of the entire systematic failure that enables and protects the Trump international crime syndicate.
Trump’s presidency is like the movie Neighbors: The average person is ill prepared to deal with people completely devoid of shame or unbounded by social convention.
Same reason that many good progressives accused (some still do) us of Trump Delusional Syndrome – how bad could it actually be? We have safeguards…
In his Apprentice style, only his biggest gaffs get press – while things like the environment, rights, international relations, voting, reproductive rights, all end up on the cutting room floor.
Even his supporters, both in congress and on the street, knew that he would lie if he testified. They called it a ‘perjury trap’ to make it sound better, but the base admission there was that they knew he simply could not testify without committing perjury.