Day 860: Mueller finally breaks silence, completely blows up Trump’s ‘total exoneration’ claims

Speaking from prepared remarks and taking no questions, Robert Mueller gave a brief press conference Wednesday morning, breaking two years of silence since taking on the role of special counsel. However, it is not the brevity that will be remembered, but rather the words. Mueller touched on some of the biggest points contained in his report and made a few things quite clear.

Namely, that Russia tried to interfere with the 2016 election to throw the election to Trump. (He not only discussed this at length, but concluded his remarks noting it again.) And he made it readily apparent that Trump very likely committed obstruction of justice.

On the latter point, Mueller laid out his road map. Due to a standing Office of Legal Counsel opinion, a sitting president cannot be indicted either now or via sealed indictment. Mueller noted that in his press conference. So, as Mueller told reporters, he could clear Trump of a crime that could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt — as he did with regard to the conspiracy probe — but could not charge him with a crime that a non-president would have been charged with.

Mueller could not have been more transparent on that point, saying, “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

In a unique legal middle ground, Trump enjoyed the ability to be exonerated by Mueller but not charged by him. With the OLC opinion binding Mueller’s hands, his words Wednesday were unequivocal and only subject to a single interpretation: Trump met the threshold to be charged with obstruction of justice. (As Mueller’s report lays out in far greater detail, there are a number of actions which could trigger such a charge.)

Trump made his voice heard with a bizarre defense after Mueller spoke.

Oddly, Trump is not claiming that he’s actually innocent, merely that there isn’t enough evidence to convict him. While that is the standard in criminal court, where defendants’ guilt must be shown beyond a reasonable doubt, it’s a strange thing to say when the court of public opinion is weighing every word.

Now the question becomes whether the House will move forward with impeachment proceedings, something that many Democrats seem to have an increased appetite for following Mueller’s remarks. Trump not only seems to have paid attention to that fact, but seems concerned by it.

Regardless of what Democrats do, Mueller’s message seemed to stem from disappointment: with Attorney General William Barr for obfuscating his report’s message, with the media for missing the crux of the report’s findings, with Congress for not doing much with the facts presented.

860 days in, 602 to go

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