Mueller bows out of public life with one last jab at Trump

WASHINGTON: Implicitly suggesting there may well have been a case of obstruction of justice involving President Donald Trump,

Robert Mueller

, the FBI’s Special Counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections bowed out from public life on Wednesday after affirming that the reason he did not charge Trump was because Justice Department regulations would not allow it since under its reading of the Constitution a sitting President cannot be indicted.


In a dramatic finale to nearly three years of political turmoil arising from reports of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential elections, Mueller made a ten-minute long statement to clarify his conclusions without taking any questions from journalists, while announcing that he is also resigning from the Department of Justice and returning to private life. He also indicated he is not inclined to testify before Congress because whatever he had to say is contained in his report and there was nothing he could or would add to that.

The gist of his statement: There was little doubt that

Russia

interfered in the US elections in various ways, from hacking the Clinton campaign servers to releasing information to damage a presidential candidate. But there was “insufficient evidence” to show that there was any collusion or collaboration from the Trump campaign on the issue.

On the second matter relating to the obstruction of justice issue, Mueller indicated that the only reason he did not or could not indict President Trump was because he was rule-bound, and his parent Justice department, to which the Special Counsel’s office is attached, is constitution-bound. And the Constitution does not allow indictment of a president while he is in office.

But in an implicit rejection of President Trump’s repeated assertion that he had been absolved of all charges, including collusion and obstruction, by the Mueller report, the Special Counsel stonily maintained: “If we had confidence that the president had not committed a crime we would have said so.”

“The special counsel’s office is part of Department of Justice so we had to abide by rules,” Mueller said, adding, “It would be unfair to potentially accuse someone of a crime when there could be no resolution.”

The statements suggested that Trump was essentially saved by a rule-bound investigators and officials adhering to the Justice Department’s interpretation of the Constitution even though the Mueller report explicitly said it does exonerate the President.

Trump has repeatedly claimed the Mueller report exonerated him.

Mueller will now go down in history as the man who indirectly implicated Trump but did not indict him citing constitutional constraints. Even the Democratic-controlled Congress may not be able to get more out of him.

"Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report," Mueller said, adding, "It contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we said. We chose those words carefully and the work speaks for itself."

The matter will now go into the political domain and become a campaign issue in the run-up to the 2020 elections.