that in the coming months. host: morgan chalfant is national security reported with the hill newspaper. andrew desiderio a political washington journal continues. schwartz joinss us now. he has written for the new yorker and new york times magazine. last year you worked on a profile of robert mueller for gq. when he breaks his silence again

tomorrow and testifies before the house judiciary committee and then the house intel committee what are you expecting from him? >> from what we've seen it sounds like it's going to be a lot of reiterating of what we have already written the report. one thing that's very interesting to me is there is so much ambiguity and legal hairsplitting in the language of the report he may inadvertently have to deviate from it a little bit just to put it in plain english and a way that people can understand particularly about the decisions about whether to prosecute and whether to charge. it's all very technical when you read it in text. a back-and-forth exchange he might have to put a finer point on things. i think we will see him avoiding strenuously having to do that and go beyond the four corners of the document. host: the gq profile that you wrote before the mueller report came out.

have brought the report here on the desk with us. in the story you write that the quiet of robert mueller is part of the uniform. what do you mean by that? >> yes. i was kind of writing about mueller the man. it's very hard to get close to him. he had an inner circle of people and none of them would talk to me either. the spokesperson for his office wouldn't talk to me. i had to go a few rings out to people that had kind of glancing encounters with him. i think as everyone anxiously awaited the release of the report there was a kind of mystique that formed around him that he personally embodied the truth about this great controversy over what happened in the last election and that he personally was going to be capable of getting to the bottom of it and with president trump noisily remarking on every development and then mueller doing exactly the opposite i think it kind of -- a kind of

fascination formed around this vacuum. host: do you think that mystique was broken with the release of the report or the less than 10 minute news conference he had after the report came out? >> no. i think the people who are waiting, who think that he holds the answers have sort of kept pushing the delivery of those answers forward. first it was a textual report and now it's the hearing tomorrow. i think there is a gap between robert mueller the pop cultural figure, the fbi guy who's going to solve this for us finally and robert mueller the man and tomorrow i think we will see those entities converge and walk away with a more realistic isture of who this person which should help us read the report with clear eyes. startingwill find out

at 8:30 a.m. eastern and you can watch it here on c-span3. c-span.org is a place you can go to watch it. you can listen to it on the free c-span radio app. if you were to talk about robert mueller, his life and qualities as a prosecutor, as fbi director and as special counsel, give us a call in this segment of the washington journal. robert mueller served in the u.s. marines and various roles in the justice department. former fbi director of course. went back into the private sector before he came back to serve as special counsel. we are talking with mattathias schwartz about that. you were just talking a minute ago about breaking the mystique about robert mueller. learning more about his personality.

here's robert mueller from 2013. he was speaking at the commencement address at the college of william and mary. say to what he had to the graduating seniors that day. with integrity because it is so essential to who and what you ultimately will become. career pathhave a and mine. many of you have no idea where you will end up. a few of you may be surprised by where life takes you. i certainly was. and in the end it is not only what we do but how we do it. careeress of your chosen you are only as good as your word. you can be smart, aggressive, articulate and indeed persuasive. but if you are not honest your reputation will suffer and once can, a good reputation never be regained.

saying goes, if you have integrity, nothing else matters. and if you don't have integrity, nothing else matters. you take from that commencement address? ityou can tell that he means and i think integrity is an inreasingly rare quality american society. i think this is why rod chose robert mueller to be special counsel because he is perceived by both parties to be above the fray of partisan politics. someone who doesn't carry water for anybody. someone who is strictly by the book as your previous guests were saying. so it's hard to think of anyone such a heavye on task and would have so much credibility no matter what came out on the light -- on the backend.

host: romney is out of irving, texas. a democrat. good morning. caller: good morning. thanks for taking my call. from everything i've seen robert mueller is a very honorable man. he has served his country well. like everything else, tomorrow when he testifies the republicans will try to tear him down because he didn't carry the water for trump. like his spineless little zombies do. and ultimately it's going to be up to the voters to disinfect the white house and believe me, it will take eight years to get the stink out of there. thank you. if the questioning does get tough at tomorrow's hearing, how do you expect mueller to respond to tough questions? >> there's been some great reporting by the times and other places looking at him in previous hearings. he's very adept and has a lot of

experience at only answering those parts of questions that he wants to answer. i think it is safe to say that he will be able to slip a lot of punches. i think wen that will almost certainly here is did you find that trump committed a crime. he said that that's something that he for a number of reasons wasn't willing to answer, fairness being one of them. barr saidrney general he could have answered that question and we will probably see members of congress use that as a foundation. that being outside the report he may just say i'm only going through what i've written which is why expectations for tomorrow in some ways are so low and this is just being presented as a reading of a document we already have in hand. schwartz, his profile

of robert mueller, master of silence is the headline. you talk about going back to his time in vietnam and his service in the marine corps and how that shaped him. can you speak to that? he had an incredibly distinguished military career. he served as an officer in the marines. he was very much in the thick of it. somett graff has done great reporting on it. he also wrote a biography of mueller. he was in a very serious battle in which half of his unit suffered casualties. was awarded the bronze star for valor and then later a purple heart. he has never personally given an account of his time in vietnam. the reporting that has been done reconstruct ito from his comrades. it is something he has never talked about. barton gelman of the washington post did a very good profile a

few years back. mueller still wears his watch on the inside of his wrist. gelman says that that is a military thing so the enemy can't see the flash of the glass. so he still carries elements of that time with him. it's hard to imagine going through such a thing and not. host: an interesting thing to look for in tomorrow's hearing. bill is waiting in boston, massachusetts. independent. good morning. caller: good morning and thank you to c-span. i was just wondering if your mueller's looked into years in boston. a lot of people are saying he is thought of as an honorable man, but to many here in boston who look at him as a guy who let poor innocent men sit in prison .or 30 years host: it was 1982 to 1988 that he served as district attorney

for massachusetts. the'm afraid i don't know case to which the caller is referring. most of my article was focused on the present. is thatresting detail mueller was a member of trump national golf club near washington, d.c. for many years and then president trump claimed that was a conflict for some reason. there was a dispute over billing. but then mueller sort of dispelled that allegation in the report. i wish i knew more about the case that your caller referred to. it sounds like they've got some facts in hand. i just don't. host: what did robert mueller say about the trump call -- a golf course? he brought it up again in the oval office? >> what did he say in the oval office? host: he brought up that they had a business dealing. >> mueller said that he was a member for a while and he wasn't

using the club and he sent a letter and resigned and it was pretty normal. the interesting thing to me about that detail is that a lot of people present mueller and trump from completely different worlds. that trump is this guy from queens and he's more of a rough-and-tumble character and mueller is this born and bred american aristocrat who went to st. paul's with john kerry and it's interesting just in terms of how the world works that trumps golf clubs were fined by mueller at least for a time apparently. host: jonesboro, georgia. caller: good morning. i have a question. during the mill or investigation, why was not one democrat questioned? the --o, why were all everybody on mother's team including wiseman, why was he on

mueller's team. and i would like to ask robert mueller personally did he write this report or did wiseman write it. there are several questions that i have about robert mueller. noter one i would like to when he was in charge of the boston field office for the department of justice, why wasn't whitey bulger ever found under his watch. he needs to answer a lot of questions. host: do you think robert mueller is trustworthy? caller: no. i do not. i think he's two-faced. i think he's doing what the democrats wanted him to do. and i would love for the republicans to get on him tomorrow. why didn't you question one democrat? host: what do you take from that? >> i don't know the party officially ancient -- party

affiliations of everyone questioned. agreement was to look at connections and possible election interference and in the wordsusion of the letter from rosenstein. between the russians and the trump campaign peered given that it was a republican campaign one would expect that he would be talking to a lot of republicans. waynestly can't say either whether he interviewed any democrats or not. but i know that he did talk to plenty of people outside the campaign as well. host: 152 videos in the c-span video library featuring robert mueller. ourcan watch them all at website, c-span.org. here's one of those events. this is robert mueller's retirement from the fbi august 2013. first former cia director george

tenant speaking about robert mueller and his experience testifying with mother in front of congress and then robert mueller's response after that. >> now bob, i am going to tell the story about how much bob and i love testifying together. i know you love testifying. [laughter] but bob had a very unique way of doing this and the first time i testified with him he sat there like a choir boy and got removed. i said, you have to learn how to emote a little bit. he said i can't emote, we are trained not to show emotion. i figured i've got to change this. so we sit next to each other and you know how before you start testifying witnesses usually cup their hands and everybody thinks we are saying something profound to each other. bob and i would be in the middle of a testimony and i would cup my hands and say something to mueller like bob, isn't that the

dumbest question you've ever heard in your life? shut up. here it comes, bob. swim, bobby, swim. shut up. they would always be bob, are you really going to take that from this guy? yes, senator. i'm not worthy. >> i was appreciative of your comments about testifying. that i will tell you that george has a selective memory. -- wereworked testifying it was true that he would complain bitterly about the tenor of some of the questions and would try to get me to smile. whereupon i would point out to george that he had been the architect of similar questions. one of those carrying the bayonets when he was staff director of the senate select committee on intelligence and we

had to appear before that committee. host: what do you think about that story? >> that's quite a story. he's very tough. it reminded me of a story from the gq piece. john millar who worked with robert mueller at the fbi showed up to fbi headquarters and he was wearing cufflinks and a shirt that was a different color from the cuffs and fancy shoes and robert mueller said to him, john, what are you doing. we dressed like lawyers here. and john said, i am dressed like a lawyer. not a drug lawyer. this is millar's account of it. i didn't get that from mueller himself. he was just teasing him about -- it's the same kind of story about how strict mueller thinks government service is and how you need to be that it's not a

vitamin -- not even ok to make a joke in a hearing. host: joe out of maine, good morning. thank youod morning p for taking my call. i just had a few comments about this conversation. president trump has refused to answer subpoenas. refused tos staff answer subpoenas. why would you do that? he has lied continuously and people who call, what are you looking at? you are seeing a completely different world than myself. topic we are talking about on the hearings tomorrow, what do you expect to hear from robert mueller?

>> i expect him to stay within because he is a company man. he is going to go by the policies of what he's told. but what hasn't been set enough is he could not subpoena or bring anyone in to testify who would claim the fifth. thehey took the fifth to fbi guidelines that are stopping us from charging the president who is an unindicted co-conspirator, they have the same laws apply that if you know the defendant is going to claim the fifth like trump's son toald junior, if he's going plead the fifth they can't ask him to testify. host: do you think robert mueller should have pushed harder for a sit down with the president himself versus the written questions that were

exchanged? caller: that's exactly what i'm saying. he couldn't push the president any harder because the guidelines say if you know he's going to take the fifth you can't push him any harder. host: met shorts, your take. question wenitely a can expect tomorrow. how hard did you fight for a sit down with the president. eventually relent on that point and allow him to answer questions in writing. of the report that i found pretty frustrating, there is a page where he talks about, it says very explicitly facts might come out later that could overturn the conclusions that we've reached in this report and it talks about all the information that they weren't apps thattain from delete communications, from sources that were overseas.

again i don't think we will get answers to those questions tomorrow because it sounds like mueller is not going any further than the report. this report was sold as being the definitive account of what happened in the 2016 election. it was supposed to settle the question for the country of whether the election itself was legitimate. there is a very loud voices on either side of that question. it was frustrating to me that there were parts of the report saying these are the best answers we have but they are not final answers because if we can't get those answers from mueller, when are we going to get them? host: republican in maryland is next. pretty bobby mueller much created his own investigative paradigm p d didn't go where the facts lead. scope when it pertained to russian interference and he knew where that was going to go and it went right to that steele dossier.

theent to the russians for clintons and it's a fact. he's got some explain them to do tomorrow. bob mueller is an embarrassment because of that. he's not going to be the savior for the democrats. he's going to be the best or child come tomorrow because he's not going to be able to tell anything that puts trump and a jackpot and that's the facts. host: how do you think he will be treated by members of congress tomorrow? will numbers of congress treat him? i think they have to respect him for the amount of work that he's put in. they have to meet him on his own ground of nonpartisanship which doesn't come naturally to members of congress. at least not all of them. so there's going to be a lot of trying to kind of pull him off of the sort of very careful

centered discriminating that he's established in the decisions in the report. so the report just to speak to what the caller was asking about, the report does talk about the origins of the investigation of the trump campaign started in the middle of 2016. it is a little bit vague how they started then but it does lay out a chronology that does hold up. particularly the contacts and georgeeph misfit papadopoulos. u.s. intelligence did receive indications that the russians had designs on interfering in the election and started to look at them. host: herndon, virginia is next.

caller: robert mueller, we pay him to do it work. to find out exactly what happened. there's three things we should know. if the russians involved our elections. did the president do any crime. those questions need to be answered. trying robert mueller is to satisfy both sides. it doesn't work like that. happenedxactly what and clear-cut. if this president commits any crimes, he is not above the law. if you didn't do anything wrong, we need to leave him alone. at the same time, i don't care about robert mueller how nice he is. crime andvery serious i think he's ready for the democrat and a republican, we have a very dirty congress, people. and i can tell you tomorrow we are going to watch a dirty game that democrats are going to play

and the republicans will play a dirty game, too. you have a chance to read the mueller report? i'm not a lawyer. american people, we are not a lawyer. when someone lies we need to tell the american people that's .hat those people did >> i think john made a lot of good points as a reader of the report that i would agree with. it's hard to know what mueller thought this all added up to. there are a lot of fascinating, surprising and disturbing facts in there. conclusions are highly legalistic and ambiguous. and then there's these passages that talk about all the things that we don't know.

and it doesn't sound like we are going to get mueller to go any further on the conclusions tomorrow. so i do share some of the callers frustrations. some have said that his intent thishat congress address through deciding whether or not to impeach. i didn't see that in the report although maybe i'm forgetting what i read. that's like an interpretation. that this questions report was going to answer beforehand that it punted on. host: in texas, republican. good morning. caller: good morning. that jerry point out nadler who is spearheading the has at investigation and long-term fight with donald

trump spanning over decades. one of those issues you can find him right on google. there's episodes of the film that you can find out where nadler is all upset because of donald trump purchasing railroad properties in his district. so this has been an ongoing fight and therefore since jerry nadler is an attorney, he should bye recused himself spearheading this investigation to start with because any court in the land, a judge will ask possible jurors to be picked. do they have or have knowledge for or against any person that is going to be a defendant. host: is there a democrat you would trust to lead this effort? if you don't trust jerrold

nadler, is there one you would trust? caller: no. because first of all, they are prejudged on the basis of what nadler has brought forth with his grades against trump with of trumpnonymity's questions. therefore you cannot have another democrat for example him you said replace because they've already been .rejudged on their merits host: any thoughts? think thomas has pinned down one of the big problems for tomorrow. i think given the climate in willngton it inevitably just to balance out what he

said. there have been concerns raised about rod rosenstein. the deputy attorney general who was for a time mother's boss. but was also involved in the firing of james comey which is one of the items under investigation in the mueller report. and he so far as we know didn't recuse himself from those elements of supervising mothers investigation. has a longnald trump history in new york and elsewhere. it's to be expected that he's going to cross paths with a lot of people. the problem of can the democrats maintain this appearance of nonpartisanship which mueller certainly delivered in substance in the report, that will be a real challenge for that party. been waiting in alabama. independent. good morning.

caller: good morning. i have been paying attention to what's going on. issued overdler has 80 subpoenas. and they all said they are not going to acknowledge any of the subpoenas that nadler issued. so he has mueller. mueller has made his report. and he has turned it over to congress and it's up to congress to act. it, nadler, ifee you issue a subpoena and they don't come in, then you can find. if you find them and they don't pay the fine, you could have them, what do you call it, put theail for not honoring fine on the subpoena. nadler hasn't than anything. he called hope picks in.

didn't swear her in to testify. what has nadler done? the last point i want to make is when this is over with wednesday, they are going to want nancy pelosi to go along with the impeachment. how can you go along with any kind of impeachment on donald trump when you have no witnesses, nadler hasn't called anybody in to testify anything. and that's where it's going to wind up at. thank you for listening to my call. host: that's tim in alabama. those are interesting points. impeachment itself while it was in the house would itself be an investigation. there would be witnesses. there would be evidence. it's not like a binary decision. it would just be a more intensive inquiry. i think there's a lot of frustration. when i wrote this profile of robert mueller everyone was

focusing their attention on the report. a lot of people were promising that it was going to deliver some definitive answers and i think there was a lot of fascinating new material in the report. a lot of surprising elements about the president's personal conduct after he took office. a clear ands not definitive answer on did the president commit a crime and did the trump campaign collude with the russians to swing the election. and we've seen both of those points argued both ways by the parties. one reason they have been able to do so is there are some any parts of the report that really in terms of the conclusions try theplit the baby despite huge volume of interesting facts. who isot robert mueller

going to step up and say what is it that we have here. ultimately that's going to have to be congress because mother has made it clear he's not going to do it. host: the gq piece from last year, robert mueller the master of silence. author mattathias schwartz. congressional delegation with them congressman ryan, we were ambushed on the airstrip and

shot. congressman ryan with shot 45 times and died on the airstrip. one defector of the people's temple died. i was shot five times on the right side of my body. announcer: sunday night on q&a, former congresswoman jacky spear talks about her memoir "undaunted: surviving down." when people say that it was a mass suicide, it was not a math beside. they were forced to drink this by jones and he had many of his guards surrounding the pavilion, i am sure, to make .ure that people did not see announcer: sunday night at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span q&a. . former special counsel robert mueller testifies on wednesday

before the house judiciary committees and intelligence committees. watch coverage on c-span3 starting at 8:30 a.m. eastern or listen on the free c-span radio app. the last time we heard from robert mueller was in may when he delivered his first public statement on the investigation into russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. here is what he had to say at the time from justice department headquarters.