Mueller Report Documents 10 Possible Instances Of Presidential Obstruction And States It Does Not Exonerate Him, Prompting Trump To Announce Complete And Total Exoneration

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Office of the Special Counsel on Thursday released the redacted findings of its 22-month investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, a 448-page report that documented roughly 10 episodes in which President Trump may have sought to impede the inquiry and stated, in a sentence supporters and detractors alike would spend the following weeks reading aloud to one another, that it "does not exonerate him." Within two hours, the President announced that he had been exonerated.

Volume II of the report laid out the episodes in numbered, lawyerly sequence: the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the President's direction to White House Counsel Don McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed, his subsequent direction to McGahn to publicly deny that the first direction had occurred, and several efforts to shape the testimony of witnesses. Investigators noted that a number of these episodes failed only because the subordinates instructed to carry them out declined to do so, a detail the administration characterized as evidence that nothing had happened.

"No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION," the President wrote, deploying a capitalization that the report itself, bound by the conventions of legal prose, had been unable to muster. The document he referred to stated that "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him," a formulation the White House described as a clean bill of health.

The public's understanding of the report had in fact been settled some weeks earlier. On March 24, Attorney General William Barr released a four-page letter summarizing the Special Counsel's principal conclusions, a document that shaped the national understanding of the report well before the report itself was available to be read. Mueller wrote privately to Barr that the letter "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the office's work, an objection that was itself summarized, much later, by other people.

The report also found that the Russian government had interfered in the 2016 election "in sweeping and systematic fashion." This conclusion, the actual subject of the 22-month investigation, drew a portion of the national attention roughly proportional to the number of words the President had publicly devoted to it, which was none. Officials confirmed that the question of whether the President had tried to end the inquiry had successfully consumed the inquiry.

At press time, the President had been completely and totally exonerated a second time, on the separate question of whether he had read the report.

Who Benefits

§Donald Trump, who saw the investigation conclude without a recommendation to charge him and watched the word "exoneration" take hold across the country several weeks before most Americans encountered the report's contrary sentence.
§The Trump 2020 reelection campaign, which acquired in "no collusion, no obstruction" a four-word slogan durable enough to survive the publication of a 448-page document that said otherwise.
§Attorney General William Barr, who established himself as the President's preferred narrator of investigations into the President, and whose four-page letter demonstrated that a summary released first will outrun a report released second.
§Future occupants of the Oval Office, for whom the episode helped establish that a sitting president may direct subordinates to shut down an investigation into himself, have those directions documented in detail, and face no charge, on the understanding that he cannot be charged.
§The government of Russia, whose "sweeping and systematic" interference in an American election, the report's central finding, was comprehensively outcompeted for public attention by the question of how the President had responded to being investigated for it.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment