News Views: Mueller ‘Conclusion’ Senseless
June 1, 2019 at 1:15 a.m.
By Gary [email protected]
Seriously.
What is going on with this Mueller guy?
After two years of digging with 16 or so of the top investigators in the country and tens of millions of tax dollars, we get this: “We concluded that we would not reach a determination, one way or the other, about whether the president committed a crime,” Mueller said in his statement Wednesday.
What?
What about the whole “no person is above the law” thing? Mueller went out of his way to spell out that basic tenet of justice in his original report.
I really don’t care which president is being investigated, it just seems to me this whole Mueller saga sets a horrible precedent.
Essentially, what he’s saying is, the president can be investigated by federal prosecutors, but those prosecutors aren’t allowed to make a determination as to whether the president broke the law.
I don’t pretend to be some expert on modern jurisprudence, but that is completely senseless. Doesn’t that beg the question, “Why bother to investigate in the first place.”
And doesn’t that, in essence, put the president above the law?
I can wrap my head around the notion that Justice Department guidelines don’t allow a sitting president to be indicted. I get that. You wait until he’s out of office to indict him or you impeach him and then indict him.
I see why Mueller felt he couldn’t indict the president based on Justice Department guidelines, but nothing kept him from concluding the president committed a crime, did it?
Instead, Mueller went out of his way to say – in his book-length report and his statement this week – that he didn’t have confidence that the president didn’t commit a crime.
In the report, he lays out a bunch of legal analysis of incidents and conversations surrounding the president that seem to suggest he may have broken the law.
But then instead of saying a crime was committed, he bends over backwards to avoid reaching that conclusion.
Very strange.
Even stranger is the fact that when you think about it, the whole reason for this investigation was to determine whether candidate Donald Trump’s campaign “colluded” with Russians to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Mueller found there was no collusion.
So any crime that Trump would have committed would have to be a process crime related to an investigation into something that apparently didn’t happen.
Meanwhile, we know Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC hired an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, to dig up dirt on Trump.
Fusion GPS hired a former British agent, Christopher Steele. Steele met with his Russian contacts, some of whom were Russian govt. officials and produced the infamous “Steele Dossier” which purported to chronicle all manner of ill behavior by Trump.
Then the FBI used Steele’s work and got warrants to look into the behavior of Trump campaign folks. This was the impetus of the collusion investigation that ultimately led to Mueller being appointed as Special Counsel.
I suppose we will never get to the bottom what really happened during the 2016 presidential campaign.
And I am sure there’s a reason for Mueller’s bizarre pronouncements, it just completely eludes me.
I would guess most average Americans don’t understand it either.
But there’s one thing I think most of us do understand:
The willingness of politicians of any stripe to do anything and everything – shady, illegal or otherwise – to get elected.
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Seriously.
What is going on with this Mueller guy?
After two years of digging with 16 or so of the top investigators in the country and tens of millions of tax dollars, we get this: “We concluded that we would not reach a determination, one way or the other, about whether the president committed a crime,” Mueller said in his statement Wednesday.
What?
What about the whole “no person is above the law” thing? Mueller went out of his way to spell out that basic tenet of justice in his original report.
I really don’t care which president is being investigated, it just seems to me this whole Mueller saga sets a horrible precedent.
Essentially, what he’s saying is, the president can be investigated by federal prosecutors, but those prosecutors aren’t allowed to make a determination as to whether the president broke the law.
I don’t pretend to be some expert on modern jurisprudence, but that is completely senseless. Doesn’t that beg the question, “Why bother to investigate in the first place.”
And doesn’t that, in essence, put the president above the law?
I can wrap my head around the notion that Justice Department guidelines don’t allow a sitting president to be indicted. I get that. You wait until he’s out of office to indict him or you impeach him and then indict him.
I see why Mueller felt he couldn’t indict the president based on Justice Department guidelines, but nothing kept him from concluding the president committed a crime, did it?
Instead, Mueller went out of his way to say – in his book-length report and his statement this week – that he didn’t have confidence that the president didn’t commit a crime.
In the report, he lays out a bunch of legal analysis of incidents and conversations surrounding the president that seem to suggest he may have broken the law.
But then instead of saying a crime was committed, he bends over backwards to avoid reaching that conclusion.
Very strange.
Even stranger is the fact that when you think about it, the whole reason for this investigation was to determine whether candidate Donald Trump’s campaign “colluded” with Russians to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Mueller found there was no collusion.
So any crime that Trump would have committed would have to be a process crime related to an investigation into something that apparently didn’t happen.
Meanwhile, we know Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC hired an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, to dig up dirt on Trump.
Fusion GPS hired a former British agent, Christopher Steele. Steele met with his Russian contacts, some of whom were Russian govt. officials and produced the infamous “Steele Dossier” which purported to chronicle all manner of ill behavior by Trump.
Then the FBI used Steele’s work and got warrants to look into the behavior of Trump campaign folks. This was the impetus of the collusion investigation that ultimately led to Mueller being appointed as Special Counsel.
I suppose we will never get to the bottom what really happened during the 2016 presidential campaign.
And I am sure there’s a reason for Mueller’s bizarre pronouncements, it just completely eludes me.
I would guess most average Americans don’t understand it either.
But there’s one thing I think most of us do understand:
The willingness of politicians of any stripe to do anything and everything – shady, illegal or otherwise – to get elected.
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