Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced his resignation on Wednesday, bringing a formal close to his investigation into Russia’s efforts to support President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Along the way, however, Mueller subtly undercut one of Trump’s most strident defenders — Attorney General Bill Barr.
Since ascending to the office, Barr has repeatedly attempted to downplay the possibility that Trump either criminally obstructed justice or otherwise made an effort to thwart Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s electoral interference. Among other things, Barr has suggested that the special counsel’s decision not to charge Trump with a crime was based on the fact that Mueller failed to uncover sufficient evidence that Trump committed a crime — and not because of the Justice Department’s longstanding view that charging a sitting president is unconstitutional.
In a summary of Mueller’s report that Barr released weeks before the report itself became public, Barr stated that he and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that the evidence compiled by Mueller “is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense” and that they made this determination “without regard to…the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.”
View the complete May 29 article by Ian Millhiser on the ThinkProgress website here.