“That opens the door for the Democrats to pounce.”
Exactly. All I’d add is that message was already clear from the report itself. I wrote about it on April 23, even excerpting the key passage from the intro to Mueller’s report on obstruction.
Mueller faced a legal, not a factual, dilemma in charging Trump, to hear him tell it today. Per DOJ policy, he couldn’t formally accuse a sitting president of a crime by indicting him, a point he reiterated this morning. Informally he could have said something like, “We think there’s probable cause to believe a crime was committed here but we’re not legally allowed to file charges,” but Mueller reasoned that would have been unfair. It would have left Trump with no official forum, i.e. a courtroom, in which to rebut the charges against him. (Try to ignore the absurdity of publishing a several-hundred-page report detailing Trump’s alleged misconduct and then worrying that it’d be unfair to accuse him of anything.)
So not only couldn’t Mueller formally accuse Trump, he couldn’t informally accuse him. How do you accuse someone when you’re not allowed to accuse him? Well, you can try to do it indirectly. Which is why he made a point of emphasizing today — again — that “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.
