Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s 22-month investigation into President Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign’s dealings with Russian officials and operatives arrived Sunday like a thunderclap.
It did not offer the “complete and total exoneration” that Trump claimed afterward. Nor, as the president asserted, was the probe “an illegal take-down that failed.”
But the summary said the report rejected the ominous narrative: that Trump and his aides knowingly conspired with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his thuggish government to steal the White House from Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Just as the president has so often tweeted, there was no collusion.
It remains an indelible negative on Trump’s record that among the seven who pleaded guilty to charges brought by Mueller were Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman; Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser; and Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer. But the collapse of the collusion claim is sure to resonate to Trump’s benefit in his re-election bid and perhaps much longer as history judges his early years as a national politician.
On the more complex question of obstruction of justice, Barr noted Mueller specifically neither concluded Trump committed a crime nor exonerated him. That left Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to make the determination — and they decided Trump’s actions (such as firing FBI Director James Comey in 2017) were not obstruction.
But as Barr wrote, Mueller noted that it is difficult to mount an obstruction case “if the evidence does not establish the president was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.”
Trump still faces other serious criminal probes that could lead to indictments over financial misconduct, tax evasion and hidden improper payoffs to two alleged mistresses.
But a massive investigation published in October by The New York Times documenting a Trump business empire built on shady, unethical, possibly illegal efforts to siphon profits and avoid taxes was shrugged off by many Americans. His attempts to buy the silence of alleged mistresses at this point are well-known and already baked in to how he is regarded.
Given this backdrop, it might be time for the focus to shift from Trump to what Democratic leaders and rank-and-file lawmakers hope to accomplish from here on out. The earliest presidential primaries are less than a year away.
If the report comes out and offers no red flags that undercut Barr’s summary, high-profile Democrats would be better served to focus on what they would do for the future of the country than on futile talk of impeachment. They risk handing re-election to a president they can’t stand if they don’t start emphasizing how they want to bring constructive change to America.
If House investigators find wrongdoing by the president, of course they should try to document it and bring it to light. But as matters now stand, it’s time for the more difficult challenge of explaining to everyday Americans how their lives would be better if a Democrat were in the White House.
— The San Diego Union-Tribune
