He also said “it’s very clear” the state’s 8th Congressional District representative did not read “a single page” of the Mueller report before giving his opinion on its release.
“Davidson is basically shrugging his shoulders at a president who has obstructed justice, engaged in witness tampering,” said Hester, who is also an attorney. “There was destruction of evidence in this case, which is what’s in the Mueller report, and is basically pretending that none of these things are laid out in black and white for the American people to see.”
Davidson said much of what Davidson had said Thursday “was fundamentally untrue,” and it’s not time to move on because the 400-plus-page report is “a referral to Congress because Mueller recognized you cannot indict a sitting president under current U.S. DOJ policy.”
Hester said Mueller cited in the report 10 instances where President Donald Trump “likely engaged in obstruction of justice.”
Hester also said, “The reason you didn’t find more instances of obstruction, because staffer after staffer — those who were most loyal and closest to the president — heard his demand and understood there was criminal intent in them and didn’t carry them out.”
And most of those staffers are now gone, Hester said.
INITIAL REPORT ON APRIL 18, 2019:
Congressman Warren Davidson, R-Troy, said the release of the Mueller report on Thursday revealed what he expected: "nothing."
“People expected nothing for which someone should have been indicted,” said Davidson, who represents Ohio’s 8th Congressional District, which includes all or parts of Butler, Clark, Darke, Mercer, Miami and Preble counties. “For a long time people put their confidence in Mueller’s investigation and worked to protect it.”
The Justice Department released to the public a redacted version of the much-anticipated investigative report by special counsel Robert Mueller. The report was the investigation on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
MUELLER REPORT: Justice Department releases redacted special counsel report
Davidson said the investigation had turned into investigating Russian meddling “into trying to de-legitimize candidate Donald Trump, first of all, and second of all, the presidency. And unfortunately many of my colleagues are going to try to connect, they’re trying to continue to spin it.”
Davidson said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a sense for trying to move on from any impeachment discussion, something that’s been on many Democrats minds since Trump’s election.
“She already set the tone saying we need to drop this impeachment rhetoric. It isn’t something for which the president should be impeached,” he said. “And we’ll see if she can bring her party along with that agenda.”
Davidson said Democrats need to “move on” from the Mueller report.
“We need to govern the country,” he said. “We’ve got lots of problems going unsolved, beginning with our border security crisis. That’s a real humanitarian crisis.
“My hope is to try to go past the resistance movement, we can try to govern the country, we can do it collaboratively, even on health care.”
Davidson toured on Thursday parts of his congressional district and said “there’s not been a lot of attention on this report.”
“I don’t think people in this district waited with bated breath, I think they have a sense of what’s in it and not in it,” he said.
Davidson said any Russian meddling in the 2016 election is “exaggerated” though he believes they attempted.
“There’s never been a partisan difference of opinion if the Russians attempted to influence this election, or any number of elections, again back to 1917 or so,” he said.
Davidson said the public is “a long way away” from having confidence in the message of Lady Justice.
“Lady Justice is holding scales, they’re balanced and she’s blindfolded,” he said. “I think we need to move towards that, we need to have confidence that we can do that as a country and then over time we need time to heal the wounds that got us to this point.”
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