No evidence
Robert Mueller wants President Donald Trump to be impeached (May 30, “Mueller: Trump was Not Absolved”). His carefully read statement was meant to encourage the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to move ahead with political impeachment hearings because he failed to find any crimes by Mr. Trump in his report.
During his statement, he deviously implied that because a sitting president cannot be legally charged with a crime, Mr. Mueller would be wasting his time by digging any deeper into whether the crime of obstruction was committed (in reality, he dug as deeply as he could after two years, 15 prosecutors and $40 million). Which begs the question of why he even began his investigation in the first place. So to salvage at least something for that $40 million expenditure of taxpayer money, he signaled to the salivating Democratic House, “If we had confidence that the president did not commit a crime, we would have said so.’’ But that was never going to happen with this disingenuous prosecutor — disingenuous in two glaring ways.
Mr. Mueller was never going to find evidence that Mr. Trump did not commit a crime because of the extreme difficulty of proving a negative, and being a lawyer, Mr. Mueller knows it. He would have little difficulty proving that a criminal committed a crime, but would find it next to impossible to prove that a criminal did not commit a crime.
He also knows that it has never been the practice of prosecutors in U.S. criminal law to exonerate a targeted criminal. Exoneration has always been the exclusive duty of a judge and jury — with those special words of finality: “Not guilty.” Prosecutors never comment on “exoneration” — they either charge and don’t charge, and Mr. Mueller knows it, but Mr. Mueller had to hurl one last smear. So instead of Congress trying to resolve substantive policy problems of immigration, infrastructure, etc., this politico wants the Congress to waste the next two years on impeachment hearings. Unfortunately for him and history, his final statement on the subject was no profile in courage.
STEPHEN M. SOKOL
Mt. Lebanon