Politics & Polls #139: The Mueller Report Book Club Featuring Quinta Jurecic

May 16 2019
By Sarah Binder
Source Woodrow Wilson School

Last week, former White House Counsel Don McGahn — a key figure in Volume II of the Mueller Report — reportedly was instructed by the Trump administration not to comply with a subpoena from House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler for documents and testimony related to the Committee’s obstruction of justice investigation. 

Continuing our Mueller Report book club, journalist Quinta Jurecic joins Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang to give listeners a roadmap to Volume II. They examine the elements comprising obstruction of justice, instances of the President’s conduct Mueller weighed against the criminal statutes (including previous orders he gave McGahn), and why Mueller felt barred by existing Justice Department policy from indicting Trump — yet explicitly states the report does not exonerate him.

Jurecic is the managing editor of Lawfare and a contributing writer to The Atlantic. She writes about politics, legal issues, and the rule of law. She previously served as an editorial writer for The Washington Post and as Lawfare's associate editor.

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He has written more than 900 op-eds, including his popular weekly column for CNN.com and The Atlantic. This year, he is the distinguished senior fellow at the New York Historical Society, where he is writing a biography of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for Yale University's Jewish Lives Series. He is the author and editor of more than 19 books including, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society,” the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress. In January 2019, Norton will publish his new book, co-authored with Kevin Kruse, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.” In spring 2020, Penguin Press will publish his other book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.” He has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and New America.

Wang is a professor at Princeton University, appointed in neuroscience with affiliate appointments in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Center for Information Technology Policy. An alumnus of Caltech, where he received a B.S. with honors in physics, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Stanford University School of Medicine. He conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University Medical Center and at Bell Labs Lucent Technologies. He has also worked on science and education policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. He is noted for his application of data analytics and poll aggregation to American politics. He is leading an effort at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to build a 50-state data resource for legislative-quality citizen redistricting. His work to define a state-level legal theory to limit partisan gerrymandering recently won Common Cause’s Gerrymandering Standard Writing Contest. His neuroscience research concerns how the brain learns from sensory experience in early life, adulthood and autism.