Thread by @JewhadiTM

The Lesson of Mueller: An innocent man's defense can look like a guilty man's obstruction thehill.com/opinion/white-…

Thousands of interviews and hundreds of subpoenas later, special counsel Robert Mueller broke his two-year Wizard of Oz-like silence in the form of a 448-page report that formally dropped the curtain on the bad political musical we’ve come to know as the Russian collusion scandal

Let the record reflect that Mueller wasted little time debunking the feigned electoral love affair between Vladimir Putin and @realDonaldTrump that so many Democrats and their allies in the news media sang to life.

With little equivocation, Barr declared that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election, including by hacking presidential nominee @HillaryClinton and @DNC docs, but there was no evidence, none, that the president or his campaign — or any American— engaged in the conspiracy.

To The @NYTimes, @washingtonpost, @CNN, @MSNBC and other media outlets that fanned the Russia collusion narrative — and to congressional Democrats such as @RepAdamSchiff, who insisted there was secret evidence to support it — I refer you to this declaration in Mueller’s report:

“In sum, the investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russia government. Those links included Russian offers of assistance to the Campaign.

In some instances the Campaign was receptive to the offers, while in other instances the Campaign officials shied away. Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities."

One message of the 1st volume of #MuellerReport is clear: It's time for the media to take responsibility for its role in inflaming the public w/a scandal that wasn’t proven, by endlessly quoting intel & partisan sources whose claims went far beyond the evidence it slithered upon.

Case closed. Russiagate was no Watergate.

The second volume of the Mueller report — dealing with 10 separate actions by Trump that could be construed as obstruction of justice — is less decisive.

It is clear from the report that an impetuous president with a famously quick temper pondered aloud about firing people such as Mueller, suggested that witnesses stick to their stories and sought leniency for some of his entangled aides.

Senior advisers took extreme actions to ensure the president didn’t act on those impulses.

If he were a mob boss seeking to protect his racketeering empire, these actions would be slam-dunk evidence of obstruction.

But, as Volume 1 of the Mueller report made clear, Trump committed no crime that he was trying to cover up.

Because Trump refused an interview with Mueller, on the advice of his attorneys, the only state-of-mind evidence that prosecutors had directly from him came from the president’s interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt, just a few days after the president fired @Comey.

In that interview, Trump made clear that he did not want to stop the Russia investigation and actually expected his actions would elongate it.

His motive, he said, was simply to get a more competent person in charge so that the probe would be “absolutely done properly” and the outcome would be the “right thing for the American people.”

That’s hardly the intentions of an obstructive criminal kingpin.

Most importantly, Trump did not ultimately take most of the formal actions he threatened — which he had the power to do under Article II of the Constitution — and thus did not actually thwart, end or impede the Mueller probe.

For the purpose of a court of law, Trump neither committed a Russia collusion crime that he needed to cover up nor took formal action that actually impeded the probe.

And that left only a theoretical case for attempted obstruction. The report shows Mueller’s team so struggled with the issue that it offered novel theories of prosecution, and then abdicated the responsibility it was given to make the traditional charging decision.