Republicans used Mueller’s caution and occasional uncertainty to discredit all the damning facts he produced
Photo: Alex Brandon/Getty Images Robert Mueller’s performance in two House hearings must have badly shaken the bipartisan cult that had grown around him for two years. Even accounting for the difficulty of precisely answering verbal questions about long text in real time, Mueller looked halting, uncertain, leaning heavily on broad refusals to engage questions he didn’t like while still managing to commit an important error requiring correction.
Mueller’s investigation made several conservative choices. He failed to bring charges against every subject he had evidence again . He declined to subpoena Trump to force him to sit for an interview, rewarding the president’s hardball tactics. He did not highlight Trump’s public dangling of pardons, which persuaded Roger Stone and Paul Manafort to stonewall the probe, as obstructive acts.
This was a key vulnerability Republicans used against Mueller in his hearing. Despite the copious evidence he produced, the lack of a bottom-line conclusion allowed Republicans to define it as exoneration and dare Mueller to disagree. Over and over, they put him in the position of either declaring that Trump had committed crimes or having to admit the president had been treated unfairly — knowing full well that Mueller’s self-imposed constraints would never allow him to do the former.
Wisconsin representative Jim Sensenbrenner insisted, “Since you decided under the OLC opinion that you couldn’t prosecute a sitting president, meaning President Trump, why do we have all of this investigation of President Trump that the other side is talking about when you know that you weren’t going to prosecute him?” Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump with a crime, he reasoned, meant that Mueller had no right to conduct a criminal investigation at all.
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