The delivery of the special counsel’s report to the Justice Department will transform the political landscape and shape the remainder of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
After nearly three years of investigation, after hundreds of interviews and thousands upon thousands of pages of documents, after scores of indictments and court hearings and guilty pleas, after endless hours of cable-television and dinner-table speculation, the moment of reckoning has arrived.
It will be a reckoning for President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for Congress, for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and, yes, for the system as a whole. The delivery of Mr. Mueller’s report to the Justice Department on Friday marked a turning point that will shape the remainder of Mr. Trump’s presidency and test the viability of American governance.
Washington has been waiting for Mr. Mueller’s findings for so long and invested in them so much that it may be hard for what he has delivered to live up to the breathless anticipation. But once released, the Mueller report will transform the political landscape, fueling calls for the president’s impeachment or providing him fodder to claim vindication — or possibly, in this live-in-your-own-reality moment, both at the same time.
Democrats on Friday played down the notion that the report would be the final word, fearing that anything less than a bombshell would undercut their own drive to investigate Mr. Trump not only on Russia’s election interference but on the myriad other subjects that have drawn their attention. Mr. Trump, for his part, had engaged in a particularly manic Twitter spree lately, assailing the “witch hunt” and the “hoax” and everyone he blames for them, like his fellow Republicans John McCain and Jeff Sessions, in what some had interpreted as a sign of his own anxiety before the special counsel’s verdict. But he was reported to appear relieved with early reports on Friday.
The fact that Mr. Mueller issued no further indictments as he wrapped up on Friday and never charged any Americans alleging criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia emboldened the president’s Republican allies, who promptly interpreted the results as exonerating him without having seen the report itself.
Yet whatever the final conclusions, the Mueller investigation has already cast a cloud over Mr. Trump and his presidency. The special counsel has demonstrated that Russia intervened in the 2016 election with the goal of helping Mr. Trump, that the Trump campaign welcomed Russians promising incriminating information on behalf of their government about Hillary Clinton and that his advisers knew about stolen Democratic emails in advance.
The investigation has demonstrated as well that Mr. Trump was seeking to do business in Russia even as a presidential candidate longer than he had previously disclosed and that he surrounded himself with crooks and liars in the form of advisers who repeatedly dissembled to investigators. That includes his campaign chairman, who is going to prison for that and a variety of financial crimes.
