Under Pressure, Robert Mueller Gives Democrats What They Wanted

In a press conference from the Justice Department on Wednesday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally gave Democrats what they’ve wanted from him since he filed his report. In the process, he destroyed the goodwill he’d built up with Republicans and Trump supporters over the last month.

For several weeks, opinions had slowly begun to change about Mr. Mueller and his witch hunt. No, nothing in the report suggested that this began as anything other than a witch hunt, but at least the former FBI director was honest in his conclusions. He found no collusion, that’s that, end of the ballgame. Fair enough. Maybe Mueller wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

But in his statement this week, Mueller ruined all of that by handing Democrats the gift of a lifetime. He did it with this single sentence: “If we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.”

Which is about as close as you can get to, “The President committed a crime” without actually saying it.

If that were Mueller’s conclusion, he should have included it in his report. That was his damn job, after all, was it not? Instead, he stands up there and tells us that the President cannot be indicted for anything, simply because the Constitution forbids it. Well, in that case, what was the point of investigating him on charges of obstruction in the first place? This wasn’t just a witch hunt, it was a complete and utter waste of taxpayer money.

We still fail to understand how President Trump, who could have fired Robert Mueller at any point over the last two years, obstructed the special counsel’s investigation. And Mueller apparently doesn’t understand quite how, either. Otherwise, he would have come to a very different conclusion in his report.

Instead, Mueller is abandoning hundreds of years of legal foundation to make it so that Trump is only innocent if proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be so. This is not the way our criminal justice system works. If Mueller could not find conclusive evidence to prove that Trump was guilty of obstruction, he had no business going on national television to say, “Yeah, but he’s not not guilty.”

We thought this guy was supposed to be a straight-laced, by-the-book, legal beagle. He proved Wednesday that he’s the partisan hack that we suspected he was from the start.