After weeks of silence, Special Counsel Robert Mueller III spoke about the contents of his Mueller Report at a quickly arranged public appearance at the Justice Department on May 29, 2019.
During his 10-minute presentation. Mueller didn’t clearly and obviously accuse the president of a crime. But he strongly implied he that he might have had DOJ policy not prohibited indictment of a sitting president.
However, he explicitly refused to exonerate Trump. He reminded us of the language used near the end of the second volume of his team’s report of their two-year investigation.
Mueller implied that Congress should pursue investigation of Russian impact on our 2016 elections and the Trump campaign’s role in obstructing investigation into the Russian attack.
Mueller’s language — in his report and in his May 29 speech — is lawyerly, dry and nuanced. He doesn’t use a sledgehammer or club to bash his point home. But he made his points nonetheless.
At no point during his speech did Mueller explicitly and clearly say, “Trump should be impeached.” He also did not say, “We would have indicted the President if we had not been explicitly prevented by A DOJ rule.”
Mueller referred to a lack of evidence, citing witnesses who would not testify and physical evidence that had been destroyed. The Mueller Report also pointed out those factors that prevented the investigation from being as thorough as possible.
Preventing an investigation from accomplishing its objectives constitutes obstruction.
Unfortunately, that lack of explicit language has given Barr and Trump the ability to claim, “no collusion, no obstruction.”
However, Mueller said, “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
Mueller said he and his team did not “make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.” This way, Mueller repeated what he had already written in the Mueller Report.
After Mueller’s speech, Donald Trump tweeted — not a big surprise. But he tweeted something different than the “no collusion, no obstruction” trope he has tweeted and said about 3,568 times. Instead of claiming “no collusion, no obstruction,” Trump tweeted, “Nothing changes from the Mueller Report. There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed! Thank you.” He claimed that “insufficient evidence” meant that he was innocent.
Trump, as usual, was wrong on several points. First, no court of law tried Trump; no court found him innocent. Also, insufficiency of evidence does not mean that someone is innocent. For example, let’s say I murder someone with a gun. But I hid the gun with my fingerprints: no one will find it. Because of that, it’s not possible to convict me won’tin a court of law. That doesn’t mean I am innocent of the crime of murder. It means that there isn’t enough evidence to convict me — to establish my guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
Lastly, Mueller both began and ended his speech on this topic: Mueller warned us about Russian oligarchs and government figures, and their aggressive and harmful actions during the 2016 election. He also warned us that they will be back just as aggressively in 2020. Further, he reminded us that we need to take steps to prevent further interference in our elections.
Unfortunately, Republicans have blocked all new legislative efforts to secure our elections. Specifically, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked all election interference laws legislators have proposed. The Republicans actively WANT the Russians to interfere on their behalf again.