What the Mueller Probe Really Means
The real fireworks will only begin now as Trump seeks to investigate the investigators.
The Mueller Report, despite the best efforts of the chief author and his partisan investigative staff, is a bone-crushing defeat for the president’s enemies. There is not a whit of evidence that any American collaborated with any Russian to alter the results of the 2016 presidential election, and there is extensive evidence that the Trump campaign was the subject of enticements to collaborate and rebuffed all of them at all levels. The laborious bulk of Mueller’s minute description of completely inconsequential twists and turns in his investigation leaves the reader in no doubt of his thoroughness, and in no doubt of the complete absence of any case that could be made for collusion, let alone cooperation in an actual crime of attempting to influence the election illegally. As there is clearly no excuse for the special counsel to have been established, Mueller devotes the second half of his report to an effort to scratch together a virtual justification for it, by leading the reader through another maze to imply that there might be a conceivable case against the president for obstruction of justice. He acknowledges that he does not have a clear idea of the president’s motives, and so cannot judge if there was a corrupt motive, but cannot exonerate him either.
This is a reprehensibly unjust and shabby device. A special counsel is not in the exoneration business. If he thinks he has evidence of a crime by an incumbent president, that reaches the point of being beyond a reasonable doubt, he recommends impeachment. By this standard, nobody could ever be exonerated of anything—all you could say is that you don’t have enough, or in the case of collusion with Russia, any, evidence. Trump could, in theory, still be guilty of colluding with the Russians to rig the last election; there just is not a scintilla of evidence to support that conclusion. The criteria for obstruction are as enumerated by the attorney general in his summary of conclusions almost two weeks before the report was released: a corrupt act with corrupt intent in order to obstruct an actual or apprehended legal proceeding. There was no crime that Trump was attempting to withhold or shelter from just discovery and adjudication, no evidence of a corrupt intent, and no corrupt act. There is only, though Mueller did not have the elemental decency to put it so clearly, though the attorney general did, evidence that the president was frequently annoyed at being tormented and defamed as a suspect in the commission of a heinous offense, of which he was not only innocent, but which did not occur.
Continued at: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-mueller-probe-really-means-53582