PHOTO CREDIT: PETE SOUZA
Even the sanitized Mueller report, personally redacted by President Trump’s servile Attorney General William Barr, was filled with so much evidence of presidential corruption it’s difficult to imagine how Trump and Barr thought they could get away with declaring for weeks the investigation resulted in a complete and total exoneration of the president.
It’s not even close. That must be why Barr held a press conference the day Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report was released so he could hammer home the administration’s false claims one last time before everyone learned the truth. “Awwk! No collusion! Awwk!” Barr squawked five times, parroting what Trump tweeted relentlessly throughout Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia’s illegal 2016 election interference on Trump’s behalf.
Barr’s other major claim was that Mueller had not reached any conclusion about whether Trump had illegally obstructed justice by attempting to thwart Mueller’s investigation. Barr said that allowed him and his deputy Rod Rosenstein, both Trump appointees, to immediately declare Trump’s innocence. In Mueller’s actual report, Americans learned neither of Barr’s claims was quite true.
The Truth About Trump
Mueller explained “collusion” was not a legal term and wasn’t even investigated. Mueller’s team did investigate “conspiracy” or “coordination” between Russians and the Trump campaign. That required evidence of a tacit or explicit agreement between campaign officials and the Russians. That’s extremely difficult to prove, and Mueller could not do it conclusively. But investigators uncovered numerous unreported contacts between Russians and the campaign those around Trump lied about. Mueller also concluded Trump’s campaign welcomed Russia’s efforts and expected to benefit from information Russia stole to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
But Barr’s biggest whopper was that Mueller was unable to make any decision about whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice. Actually, Mueller said a long-standing Justice Department rule against indicting a sitting president prevented him from making that decision. But Mueller’s investigation assembled an enormous mountain of evidence about Trump’s repeated attempts to fire Mueller, strictly limit what Mueller could investigate and Trump’s lies and ordering subordinates to lie to cover up the president’s obstruction.
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“The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” Mueller wrote, “but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” “Mostly” is a key word. That means Trump succeeded in obstructing justice at times. He certainly had criminal intent. Trump wanted to break the law. Fortunately, Trump was just as incompetent at obstructing justice as he was at accomplishing many of his other undemocratic intentions as president.
Trump’s most brazen attempt to shut down the investigation came just a month after Mueller’s appointment. That’s when Trump twice ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to tell Rosenstein to fire Mueller. Fearing a political firestorm and getting caught up in a crime himself, McGahn drove to the White House, packed up his belongings and began preparing his resignation. He told White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus that Trump was ordering him to “do crazy shit.” Priebus persuaded McGahn to ignore Trump. Later, McGahn refused another order from Trump to lie publicly about whether the president had ever ordered Mueller’s firing.
What the Constitution Says
The fact Justice Department rules prevented Mueller from indicting Trump for obstructing justice, lying about it and ordering others to lie didn’t mean Mueller was leaving it up to Trump’s hand-picked Attorney General to exonerate the president. Mueller wrote that the Constitution designated Congress as the body empowered “to prohibit a president’s corrupt use of his authority.” Mueller said allowing Congress to apply obstruction laws “to the president’s corrupt exercise of the powers of his office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”
Most congressional Democrats aren’t terribly eager to bring impeachment charges, even with the documentation of all the ways Trump is corrupting our democracy. Trump’s fundamental dishonesty isn’t really news to anyone. But Democrats know Republicans controlling the U.S. Senate will immediately swat down impeachment anyway to maintain their power going into the 2020 elections.
Mueller’s 448-page report on Trump’s sleazy, unethical conduct was never going to disturb many of his voters. The best Democratic course right now is their scheduled series of televised hearings exposing all the president’s secrets and lies in the report. Unlike Trump’s fantasy versions of reality, the Democratic hearings will be rooted in the American reality of having a national embarrassment as president. It might not reach the hard-core haters who would cheer if Trump really did shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, especially if it were someone Latino or Muslim. But for everyone else, the hearings could build toward the election of a personally decent, respectable president in 2020.
Most Americans—Democrats, independents and any honest Republican whose job doesn’t depend on pleasing Trump’s most socially unacceptable supporters—have always preferred that.
