#muellerreport #election2020
Robert Mueller and his band of merry men (and women), spent nearly 2 years investigating Trump, his campaign and Russia. The output of that investigation was a 450-page report. The report was broken into two volumes, volume 1 focused on conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia and volume 2 focused on obstruction of justice. On the first subject, Mueller was clear in his conclusion, there was no conspiracy between the campaign and Russia and Russia’s government interfered in our election. Sure, volume 1 included a bunch of tantalizing tidbits of what some may consider to be campaign misconduct (I would), but given the conclusion, that’s all they were.
Volume 2, however, was where the Mueller report drew the most criticism. On the subject of obstruction of justice, Mr. Mueller could not reach a conclusion. To me, it felt like reading a long novel, only to reach the climax and have the author say, “well, choose your ending…”. Why include this in the report if you could not reach a conclusion? Mr. Mueller, in my opinion, hid behind an OLC opinion and left it to the American people to decide what to do. The rational was that while the OLC opinion prevented Mr. Mueller from indicting a sitting President, it did not prevent him from continuing the investigation to either file criminal charges against co-conspirators, or the President once he left office.
At 450 pages, the report was left unread by the majority of Americans. Their understanding of the report came through layered opinions of the report from their respective TV personalities; CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. So the majority of Americans were told what they wanted to hear. If you were pro-Trump, you got “No collusion”. And as you would expect, the other group got “My Presidency is fucked…”. As we have pointed out before, impeachment is only the first step of a long and difficult process to remove the President from office. One that is much more painful and dangerous than voting him out. While impeachment proceedings heated up when the Mueller report was first released, those coals have since cooled.
The Democrats, at this point, have the votes necessary to bring up articles of impeachment and pass them. What they do not have, are the necessary votes to have any hope in getting Trump convicted of the impeachable offense in the US Senate. In my opinion, the purpose of the hearings was to gauge the public’s reaction to the “facts” as spoken by the mythical Robert Mueller.
Yet, all I saw yesterday, was an old (and distinguished) man who seemed to step over his own words and refused to answer much more than “I cannot speak to that” and “read the report”. Perhaps Mr. Mueller and the justice department are playing the long game. Perhaps they see their job as done.
Whatever the reason for Mr. Mueller’s stance, it was bad timing for the Democrats and their potential for impeachment.
