From NYRB, David Cole writes about the Mueller Report:
The report establishes beyond doubt that a foreign rival engaged in a systematic effort to subvert our democracy. Tellingly, the Russians referred to their actions as “information warfare.” One would think that any American president, regardless of ideology, would support a full-scale investigation to understand the extent of such interference and to help ward off future threats to our national sovereignty and security. Instead, Mueller’s report shows that Trump’s concern was not for American democracy, but for saving his own skin.
In both his initial letter to Congress and his press conference, Barr emphasized that Mueller did not charge Trump with the crime of obstruction of justice. What Barr did not say, however, was that Mueller declined to do so not because the evidence did not support the charge, but because he concluded that it would be inappropriate to level such a charge against a sitting president. The Department of Justice, Mueller noted, has taken the position that even a sitting president who has engaged in blatantly criminal activity cannot be indicted, because a jury of twelve citizens should not have the power to remove an elected president from office by a guilty verdict. Presidential crimes should be assessed by Congress in impeachment proceedings or by the public at the ballot box.
As special counsel, appointed by and reporting to the Justice Department, Mueller considered himself bound by its legal interpretation. He further reasoned that since he could not indict President Trump no matter how strong the evidence against him, it would be unfair to conclude in his report that Trump had committed a crime, because without a trial, Trump would not have an opportunity to clear his name. Thus Mueller’s reticence stemmed from a concern for fairness, not from any doubt about the evidence. He noted that had he concluded that the president had not obstructed justice, he would have said so. Instead, he wrote that the report “does not exonerate” Trump.
That is classic Muellerian understatement. The report dispassionately lays out the facts, which are an indictment in all but name. Many of the incidents described had been reported previously, but often based on unnamed sources and reflexively derided by Trump and his supporters as “fake news.” Mueller conducted a herculean two-year investigation, issuing more than 2,800 subpoenas, executing nearly 500 search warrants and 280 orders for electronic communications intercepts and records, and interviewing about 500 witnesses, 80 before a grand jury. The report rests its determinations of credibility on multiple named sources and thoroughly explains its reasoning. Its objective “just the facts” approach only underscores its veracity.
The results are devastating for Trump. The report portrays a consistent pattern of deception and repeated efforts to impede the Mueller investigation. The obstruction began with Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey after he declined to end an investigation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Mueller describes how Trump enlisted others, including Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, to conceal the motive for firing Comey by asserting that it was because of his handling of the Clinton e-mail investigation. (It’s a mystery, given Rosenstein’s involvement in this initial incident of obstruction, why he didn’t have to recuse himself from overseeing the investigation, as Sessions did.)
Mueller also reveals that Trump directed White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire the special counsel on accusations of conflict of interest that Trump knew were groundless, and after this was reported by The New York Times, Trump instructed McGahn to lie about it. Trump lambasted Attorney General Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the investigation, even though ethics rules required that Sessions do so because of his involvement in the campaign being investigated, and Trump repeatedly pressured Sessions to “unrecuse” himself. He met privately with his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and asked him to deliver a message to Sessions directing him to limit the special counsel investigation to future threats, thereby insulating the 2016 conduct by the Russians and the Trump campaign from inquiry. He personally interceded to delete from a statement about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer any reference to the lawyer’s offer to provide compromising information on Hillary Clinton. He encouraged important witnesses, including Cohen and Manafort, not to cooperate with the investigation. On multiple occasions, his staff simply refused to carry out his requests. As Mueller puts it, “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
Some of Trump’s defenders, including Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, have argued that the president has the constitutional authority to terminate any federal prosecution and thus cannot be guilty of “obstructing justice.” Mueller convincingly refutes that argument. He notes that obstruction of justice requires a “corrupt” intent, distinguishing between a decision that an investigation does not serve the nation’s purposes, on the one hand, and efforts to conceal wrongdoing by oneself or one’s family or associates, on the other. The latter, Mueller argues, is no more within the president’s constitutional authority than would be a decision to curtail an investigation for a bribe. No reasonable reader can come away from the report with anything but the conclusion that the president repeatedly sought to obstruct an investigation into one of the most significant breaches of our sovereignty in generations, in order to avoid disclosure of embarrassing and illegal conduct by himself and his associates.