Thread by @JewhadiTM

Robert Mueller's 'no questions' routine is absolute nonsense thehill.com/opinion/judici…

Mueller announced that “the report is my testimony” and that he would not answer questions from Congress either, beyond what is already in his final report.

From anyone else, such a statement would be denounced as arrogant, evasive, or both. However, many members of Congress and the media accepted it as the gospel according to Mueller.

The problem is that Mueller was uttering absolute nonsense about his inability to reach a conclusion. He likewise did not offer a principled basis for refusing to answer any questions.

This includes obvious questions such as why he refused to comply with the request from his superiors to identify grand jury material, which delayed the release of his report. The disconnect in the coverage of his remarks was striking.

AG Barr testified for hours on his role and has answered dozens of questions. He was promptly dismissed as evasive and even perjurious. Mueller declared he would tolerate no questions and declined to address any criticism of his work with very little objection from the media.

The press conference this week should be an embarrassment for the Justice Department. The agency has long maintained that the special counsel could perform the same function as an independent counsel in determining whether high ranking officials committed criminal acts.

For two years, Congress and the Justice Department expressly anticipated findings of any criminal conduct. Mueller employed a massive staff and spent tens of millions of dollars. Yet, it now appears that he never intended to make any findings of possible crimes by President Trump

Mueller insisted that, because there is a Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting president, he interpreted that to bar him from finding the basis for criminal conduct.

According to Mueller, you can investigate but not reach basic conclusions on what the investigation found. One could understand why he would not be eager to answer questions about such an absurd interpretation, when his cited sources directly contradict him.

His instructions and mandate were crystal clear. His position is even more nonsensical when you look at what he has already done. Mueller declared that “we concluded that we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime.”

Yet, Mueller contradicted that statement when he declared that “if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so.”

So which is it? Mueller actually did reach a “determination one way or the other” on crimes related to collusion.

In his special counsel report, he found that he could “not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

In effect, Mueller ultimately came across as almost coquettish in his declaration that he would not make a clear finding of a possible crime but could not rule out criminal conduct by the president.

In other words, Mueller can produce hundreds of pages of evidence of possible criminal conduct and repeatedly refer to not exonerating Trump of crimes but somehow cannot reach a conclusion on the weight of the evidence.

Of course,Mueller did not address such questions because he would not tolerate questions. The media simply listened obediently as he claimed that he was only being “fair” when he repeated that he could not clear Trump of the crime.

That, of course, led the media to declare that Mueller really was searching for criminal conduct with a wink and a nod.

Whatever space Mueller occupied in maintaining such a position, it was neither created nor countenanced by federal law or Justice Department policy.

Instead, he accepted the job of special counsel and then radically redefined it, without telling anyone outside of his staff. In that sense, he failed as special counsel. Mueller was not appointed to be a chronicler of allegations.

Mueller was appointed to perform a prosecutorial function in the investigation of a president and his associates. Moreover, he does not get to dictate what Congress can investigate, or to stonewall the media.