Joseph diGenova - Fox News
Bret Baier says Robert
Mueller made it exponentially harder for Nancy Pelosi to hold back call for
impeachment
Special counsel Robert
Mueller's statement on the Russia investigation gave ammunition to Democrats
who want to impeach President Trump, says 'Special Report' anchor Bret Baier.
While he made it clear that
his investigation is closed, the main takeaway from outgoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s surprise farewell statement to the media Wednesday is
that he desperately wanted to take down President Trump, but simply couldn’t
find a way to do it.
In a parting shot to cap off two years of outrages, Mueller tried to
convince the American people that their duly elected president is a criminal
who couldn’t be charged due to a technicality, and therefore it’s up to
Congress to impeach him.
If not for a flimsy piece of
paper that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel
(OLC) compiled long ago, Mueller suggested, the president of the
United States would be in the dock for “obstructing” an investigation into a
conspiracy theory about his campaign and the Russian government.
This is so ridiculous that
Mueller didn’t even dare to say it plainly. Instead, he fell back on the
convoluted language in his report, hoping to obfuscate an issue that Attorney
General William Barr had previously clarified by determining that the special
counsel’s investigation did not produce sufficient evidence to justify charging
President Trump with obstructing justice.
“If we had had confidence that
the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller
told reporters, explaining that, as part of the Justice Department, his office
was “bound by” the OLC’s opinion.
“Charging the president with a
crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider,” Mueller said.
That’s a fantasy Mueller just
tried to sell on national TV. Here’s the reality.
If President Trump actually
committed a crime, there is nothing in the OLC’s opinion that would have
prevented the special counsel or the attorney general from saying so.
The most relevant concern the
OLC raises is that an indictment “exposes the President to an
official pronouncement that there is probable cause to believe he committed a criminal
act,” which could impair “his credibility in carrying out his constitutional
responsibilities.”
The motive
is obvious. Mueller, having failed for two years to find Trump-Russia
“collusion,” is trying to reframe the Russiagate narrative in an effort to put
some wind back in the sails of the impeachment effort.
A special counsel’s private report to
the attorney general ran no such risk, especially since Barr was under no legal
obligation to make Mueller’s report public. Special counsels don’t issue
indictments – grand juries do.
That’s why the last man with responsibilities
similar to Mueller’s – Independent Counsel Ken Starr – had no
qualms writing definitively about findings of criminal wrongdoing by
the subject of his investigation, President Bill Clinton.
“The Office of Independent Counsel
(OIC) hereby submits substantial and credible information that President
/Clinton obstructed justice … the President lied under oath to the grand jury
and obstructed justice,” Starr wrote, along with dozens of other unambiguous
determinations that President Clinton had committed crimes.
The idea that the OLC somehow stopped
Mueller from doing the same thing is absurd.
If Mueller thought there was probable
cause to charge President Trump with obstruction of justice – or any other
crime – he could have said so in his report without any repercussions.
Because Mueller’s report was a
private, internal Justice Department document intended for the attorney
general, Mueller could draw any conclusion he wanted regarding President Trump
without violating Justice Department policy against disclosing derogatory
uncharged conduct.
If, on the other hand, Mueller
believed that the evidence was not sufficient to establish a chargeable case of
obstruction of justice, he could have said so just as easily. He did, in fact,
do exactly that with dozens of other potential crimes over the course of his
report, including the one that served as the basis for his entire
investigation.
Most crucially, Mueller’s own
report admitted that the Special Counsel’s Office “did not
establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the
Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Attorney General Barr and Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had the courage and integrity
to do what Mueller would not. Reviewing the same underlying material
that Mueller developed, and in consultation with other senior Justice
Department attorneys, Barr and Rosenstein jointly concluded that the evidence
was “not sufficient” to constitute obstruction of justice by President Trump.
Period.
More importantly, Barr went out of his
way to dispel any notion that his determination had anything to do with the
OLC’s opinion.
“Our determination was made without
regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround
the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president,” Barr said.
The entire idea that President Trump’s
vindication rested solely on the OLC opinion should have died the day Barr
released his preliminary summary of the Mueller report’s conclusions.
Unfortunately, Mueller has created new
shades of gray for the Democrats to exploit and chose this politically
opportune moment to do so, as the Russiagaters flail on Capitol Hill.
The motive is obvious. Mueller, having
failed for two years to find Trump-Russia “collusion,” is trying to reframe the
Russiagate narrative in an effort to put some wind back in the sails of the
impeachment effort.
Mueller couldn’t even stop himself
from dropping a not-so-subtle hint to that effect when he spoke to reporters
and the TV audience, characterizing the OLC’s opinion as saying that “the
Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to
formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”
Undoubtedly, those making a show out
of trying to impeach President Trump over the next year will hang on these
words and adopt Mueller’s narrative – even though it’s a far cry from the
“collusion” hoax that spawned this whole sorry saga.
If that wasn’t Mueller’s intention all
along, it certainly has been ever since he must have realized that his whole
investigation was nothing more than a witch hunt.
The case was made and is now closed,
but that didn’t stop Mueller from taking one last shot at President Trump that
will ultimately change nothing about the conclusions Mueller made in his own
report.
Joseph diGenova, Fox News,
30-5-2019
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