EmmetT.Flood Special Counsel to the President, makes it quite clear what is wrong with the Mueller. Report. Barr is being task to fix this.
The SCO Report suffers from an extraordinary legal defect: It quite deliberately fails to comply with the requirements of governing law. Lest the Report’s release be taken as a “precedent” or perceived as somehow legitimating the defect, I write with both the President and future Presidents in mind to make the following points clear. I begin with the SCO’s stated conclusion on the obstruction question: The SCO concluded that the evidence “prevent[ed] [it] from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. ”SCO Report v.2.p.2. But“ conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred ”was not the SCO’s assigned task, because making conclusive determinations of innocence is never the task of the federal prosecutor.
What prosecutors are supposed to do is complete an investigation and then either ask the grand jury to return an indictment or decline to charge the case. When prosecutors decline to charge, they make that decision not because they have “conclusively determin[ed] that no criminal conduct occurred, ”but rather because they do not believe that the investigated conduct constitutes a crime for which all the elements can be proven to the satisfaction of a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors simply are not in the business of establishing innocence, anymore than they are in the business of “exonerating” investigated persons. In the American justice system, innocence is presumed; there is never any need for prosecutors to “conclusively determine” it. Nor is there any place for such a determination. Our country would be a very different (and very dangerous) place if prosecutors applied the SCO standard and citizens were obliged to prove “conclusively…that no criminal conduct occurred.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/politics/house-democrats-barr-mueller.html