Mueller offers sly impeachment bait
Robert Mueller's 11 A.M. statement to the media today stuck to what was in his report (which he said "speaks for itself") but selectively highlighted and sequenced points intended to damage President Trump, providing obvious bait for impeachment proceedings. Here is one example (transcript):
[I]f we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.
YouTube screen grab.
It is not the job of prosecutors to state that a suspect "clearly did not commit a crime" — only to state whether there is sufficient evidence to prosecute.
In discussing the second part of the report on obstruction, he repeated the point:
[I]f we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.
Immediately, he followed with this:
The introduction to the volume two of our report explains that decision. It explains that under long-standing department policy a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office.
This juxtaposition implies that the real thing they did "not make a determination" about was the policy against indicting. That is sly to the point of misleading.

No doubt, Democrats will be vociferously arguing that.
He was also sly in stating that he believes that A.G. Barr acted in "good faith" in releasing virtually all of the report, which implies that he and others disagree with Barr.
He provided a run-through of the key points on the report, most of it familiar to anyone who followed the news about it.
He also took the Olympian position that this would be the last thing he has to say, which is why he would not take questions. He mentioned that if he is subpoenaed to testify to Congress, he will not say anything that was not in the report. (Do people, including former public employees, get to reply to a question — especially a question related to their work for taxpayers — that they refuse to reply?) This would foreclose any questions as to why he felt it was the job of a federal prosecutor to "exonerate" a person under investigation, instead of a simply black-white prosecute-or-not-prosecute decision, as is the customary procedure.
I see this as a defensive move, perhaps to protect his good friend James Comey, as well as protect his office's record in the face of disappointment by the Trump-haters that he provided no indictments.
FOLLOW US ON
Recent Articles
- Donald Trump: Right Man, Right Moment
- Trump Means to Reduce China
- Islam Is Incompatible with Democracy
- ‘Maryland Man’ Not a Maryland Man
- If Rubio Doesn’t Act, He Risks Giving the CCP Dominance over South American Shipping
- Secretary Hegseth Threatens the Deep State
- Biden's National Censorship Regime
- Four Years, Five Fiascos: The Toll of Government Overreach
- The Legacy of the Roberts Court
- Parental Rights at Risk from Tyrannical State Overreach
Blog Posts
- Leftist judges (again) went on a rampage today
- Selfies with a corpse: Idiots take grinning cell phone photos with the body of Pope Francis, lying in state
- Buh-bye ActBlue! Trump set to sign memorandum targeting foreign dollars in American elections
- With the ‘Maryland father’ stunt failing, Democrats shift to the ‘disappeared’ Venezuelan
- Gunfight at the Oregon corral
- Sunny Hostin shreds Trump’s $5,000 ‘baby bonus’ idea as racial politics
- President Trump must secure a Canadian tariff framework deal this week
- LA government sends out ‘brush clearance’ warnings to property owners…months after their homes and businesses burned down
- To defuse the risk from unvetted illegal migrants, settle the Constitutional questions
- Restoring our national monuments and resurrecting U.S. historical truth
- Decentralized Capitalism: The future of free markets
- The Democrat party is flying apart
- Want more babies? Get HR off our backs
- No Kristi on my TV channel
- EPA chief Lee Zeldin comes to see the Tijuana sewage fouling San Diego