https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-report-special-counsel-investigations/
So much for collusion. The media conversation has now officially moved on from the obsession of the last two years to obstruction of justice.
That’s because the first volume of the voluminous Mueller report, the half devoted to what was supposed to be the underlying crime of a Trump conspiracy with Russia, came up completely empty. It tells us very little that’s new. There’s no particularly sinister information about Carter Page, the bit player the FBI repeatedly told the FISA court was probably a Russian agent. The operators who portrayed themselves as closest to WikiLeaks or Russia were usually braggarts and liars exaggerating their importance. Nothing came of the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Paul Manafort wasn’t at the center of conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, but operating in his greedy self-interest.
The Trump campaign was amateurish and without scruple in exploiting the WikiLeaks disclosures, but we all could have agreed on that long ago, without a years-long special-counsel investigation. Indeed, given how unlikely collusion always was and how far the evidence gathered by Mueller is from showing it, one wonders why the special counsel couldn’t have issued an interim report long ago, dispelling the persistent — and poisonous — idea that Trump was about to be proven a traitor.
The business end of the Mueller report is the second volume, on obstruction. The investigation ended up following the typical pattern of special-counsel probes on a much larger scale — fixating on process crimes even when there is no underlying offense. Only in this case, the target was the president of the United States.
The report implicitly picks an argument with Attorney General William Barr over the question whether a president can obstruct justice in the course of exercising his lawful powers. We are inclined to Barr’s view that he can’t. Regardless, the case against Trump is ambiguous, as even Mueller acknowledges.