President Donald Trump couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome of Robert Mueller’s investigation than what Attorney General William Barr shared in his summary of the special counsel’s report on Sunday: Mueller’s probe into alleged collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice effectively cleared the president of any criminal wrongdoing in the eyes of the Justice Department.
That doesn’t mean we’re at the end of this matter, but we do have our first real conclusions by legal minds steeped in the subject matter — finally.
Attorney General Barr split the Mueller report into two segments: one on collusion, and another on obstruction of justice. While both are separate legal issues, they’re also intertwined, since the evidence of one impacts the validity of the other.
If you committed collusion, you’re likely to have committed obstruction. But if you didn’t commit a crime, it’s hard to argue you obstructed justice to hide a non-existent crime.
The AG’s summary says that there were “two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.” The key takeaway:
The Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.
We already knew that Russia interfered in the U.S. election. That was a given. In 2017, the director of National Intelligence released a lengthy report revealing the intelligence community’s belief that Russia was continuing to engage in a “longstanding desire to undermine the [U.S.]-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.”
Barr’s summary confirms this longstanding problem. He writes that Mueller concluded that the Russians employed multiple offers to try and “assist the Trump campaign.”
In an immediate sense, this means the Trump administration should continue pushing back on Vladimir Putin, as nothing Putin does is in the best interests of the United States — or anyone except himself.
Going forward, what this means is that Democrats will continue their demands for the full release of Mueller’s report, which should come after all proper redactions get completed. Then you can expect they’ll use their subpoena power to probe each one of the attempts Russia made to help the Trump campaign.
The collusion effort won’t die — it’ll just continue burning with the Democratic base.
Meanwhile, the question of obstruction of justice is more complicated. The AG’s summary says that “while [Mueller’s] report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Indeed, Mueller punted an answer to that question to the AG, who said:
[We] concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.
The second part of that statement is critical because current DOJ policies state that it’s unconstitutional for the DOJ to indict a sitting president. But Barr said that even leaving that issue aside — even if the DOJ changed its policies on this front — they would still decline to indict Trump based on the evidence Mueller collected.
That leads to two things that make obstruction even harder to prove in this case. The first: If there’s no collusion crime, then it doesn’t make sense for an obstruction crime to exist, as Barr notes:
In making this determination, we noted that the Special Counsel recognized that “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference,” and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction.
The second issue with the allegations of obstruction is that the main proof for the crime is Trump’s decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey. Removing an FBI director is entirely within the president’s executive powers under the Constitution, so you’d have to say Trump used proper legal authority to obstruct justice. And while that’s not impossible, it is difficult to prove.
At most, you’d have to say that Trump’s decision to fire Comey would amount to an abuse of justice. That’s not a criminal question for the Department of Justice; it’s an impeachment question Congress has to determine.
Nothing in Barr’s summary, Mueller’s unreleased full report, or current congressional testimony suggests there’s evidence to impeach Trump. But the line hanging from Mueller’s report on the obstruction question — “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” — has been and will be repeated ad nauseam by Democrats and the media. They’ll use that to say they’ll have evidence, after Mueller’s report is released and Democrats start subpoenaing, to impeach Trump.
Remember, the Democratic establishment does not want impeachment; the base does. So while Barr’s summary and Mueller’s report appear to exonerate Trump, the Democratic base will still use that line to push for impeachment. That decision will likely open up a war between the base and establishment ahead of the 2020 presidential primaries.
All we have to do is sit back and watch.
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