"The problem is not whether it's ethical"

March 31, 2019, 17:22 GMT

By Allan Smith

White House acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said Sunday that the question of whether the Trump campaign's actions against Russia were unethical was "unacceptable". was not important. what matters is that these acts were not found to be criminal.

CNN's Jake Tapper asked Mulvaney on "The State of the Union" to respond to the statement by House Speaker Adam Schiff last week that the campaign had acted immoral and corrupt vis-à-vis Russia, whether or not it involves Trump's negotiations on a possible Trump tower in Russia, sharing survey data by former campaign president, Paul Manafort , with a Russian partner who, according to law enforcement, is linked to Russian intelligence, or to the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 between senior campaigners and the Russians who had promised to dirty the candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

"The problem is not whether it is ethical," Mulvaney said before criticizing the behavior of the California Democrat with regard to his presidency.

"But, forgetting Adam Schiff for a second, what about the broader point regarding ethics and morality?" Tapper said.

"I think voters will decide the ethics and morals of the people they voted for," Mulvaney said. "People loved Bill Clinton even though they might not think it was so ethical.This is not the work of the House Intelligence Committee." The work of the House Judiciary Committee is not the job of the House Oversight Committee, they are supposed to look at how the government works, and voters make decisions about candidates in other jurisdictions. places. "

Last week, Attorney General William Barr issued a four-page summary of Mueller's report on several hundred pages of his investigation into the two-year investigation of Russia's interference in the state of affairs. Presidential election of 2016 and about whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russian authorities. Barr stated that Mueller had found that the campaign or anyone associated with it did not collude with Russia.

With respect to the potential obstruction of justice, Mueller's report would neither involve nor exonerate the president, but Barr-l 'author of the memorandum criticizing the investigation on the Obstruction of Mueller's training before becoming Attorney General – said that he would not pursue charges of obstructing the president, believing that the evidence did not warrant them.

On Friday, Barr announced in a letter to leaders of the Senate and Judiciary Committees that he would issue Mueller's report outlining the redactions in a few weeks. Barr said in this letter that he "was not considering submitting the report to the White House for a review of the privilege" before its publication. Trump said that he had "nothing to hide."

But in a pair of tweets on Friday, Trump seemed to suggest that he might not want the full report to be published, claiming that "no matter what radical left-wing democrats get, no matter what we give them, it will never be enough. "

"Look, they will harass and complain and resist (the theme of their movement)," he writes. "So maybe we should just take our victory and say NO, we have a country to run!"

Asked about these comments, Mulvaney replied that the chair was not proposing that the full report be retained.

"I think the president is exacerbating the same frustration that many people have when the Mueller report was released, and it turned out exactly as he had announced," Mulvaney said. "So, now, as usual, you believe the president has kept his word in his tweets … … but it's done, the report is there, it's extraordinarily complete, as you I think they've talked to 500 people and issued 2,800 subpoenas, and that completely exonerates the president. "There is no collusion. Obstruction of justice. "

In its report, however, the special council stated that "although this report does not conclude that the president has committed a crime, he does not exonerate him either," Barr wrote in his summary.

A NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday revealed that Americans were not clear whether Trump had been cleared.

The survey, conducted in the days immediately following Barr's summary, revealed that 29% of Americans said they believed Trump had been cleared of any wrongdoing, while 40% said they did not believe the president had been cleared.

Nearly a third of Americans – 31% – do not know if Trump is cleared.