The Mueller report drives home the point that the president puts his own ego before the national security interests of the country.
In his remarks on Thursday, Atty. Gen. William Barr said the final report submitted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found no evidence that any American, including President Trump, had colluded with Russia in illegal activities.
But neither Barr nor Mueller’s report itself has answered a crucial question: Is Trump a threat to U. S. national security?
From the beginning, the FBI’s investigation triggered bizarre and inexplicable behavior from the president when questions about his campaign’s relationship to Russia were raised. The day after firing FBI Director James B. Comey in May 2017, Trump met the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador in the Oval Office, according to the report, and told them Comey was a “nut job” and “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
The FBI was clearly worried about Trump’s behavior around the time of Comey’s dismissal — the event that led directly to Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. As James Baker, the FBI’s former general counsel, testified before Congress last year, Trump’s actions presented a national security threat in addition to possible obstruction, because “the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done.”
Mueller’s report, released Thursday in redacted form, presents abundant evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a massive effort to interfere in the 2016 U. S election.
Again and again we have seen that the president puts his own ego before the national security interests of the country.
It also notes that “the president had a motive to put the FBI’s Russia investigation behind him,” since a thorough FBI investigation “would uncover facts about the campaign and the president personally that the president could have understood to be crimes.
