The special counsel should have offered an opinion on whether Trump criminally obstructed justice.
There is much in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to concern the American public. It recounts a tale of Russian electoral interference that everyone (save President Donald Trump) now recognizes as extensive. And it details a course of obstructive conduct by the president that borders on criminality.
Yet Mueller reached no conclusion about the president’s behavior, and that is an even greater concern. For in elevating the institution of the president above the rule of law, Mueller has done a disservice to the nation.
With almost the very first words of Volume II of his report—the section on obstruction of justice—Mueller tells us that he flinched. He says that, in the end, his office declined to “apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgement that the President committed crimes.”
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In other words, he decided not to answer one of the two most important questions that have plagued the American body politic—whether the president acted criminally to obstruct an investigation of his activity. That choice is particularly noteworthy because it stands in stark contrast to Mueller’s decision to give us an answer to the other question—whether or not the Trump campaign conspired with Russia.
Why would Muller have declined? We know it is not because he thought the evidence was inadequate. Indeed, quite to the contrary, Mueller explicitly stated that “if he had confidence” that the evidence was inadequate to prosecute the president, he would have said so. He did not.
Instead, he said that certain issues prevented him from exonerating the president—which is a way of saying that the evidence supported a conclusion that the president had, in fact, obstructed justice. Indeed, any fair reading of the evidence presented in the report reveals a course of conduct—ranging from attempts to remove the special counsel to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses in an effort to get them to limit their testimony—that demonstrates the president’s obstructive intent.
