Russia Probe
What Mueller Really Said On Obstruction
This is not to call out longtime TPM Reader EB, with whom I just had a good exchange about this. But I reprint a portion of EB’s note because many other readers seem to be under the same misimpression. And it is a very important one. I’m happy to say our team got this right. But it’s eluded most other news outlets, at least inasmuch as the story gets reduced to headlines and glosses about Mueller’s judgment on obstruction of justice. To be clear, by the end of the day, a lot of the big outlets had this right. But it’s not how it played in headlines or the quick cable news summaries. From EB …
I think it’s safe to assume that from the get go Mueller had no intention of indicting Trump because of the DOJ policy. Then he comes out and says, from what I can tell without reading the full report on my own, that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him with a crime. What’s up with that? He never saw his job as indicting and prosecuting Trump, so why come a conclusion regarding criminality?
