Mueller Statement: I’m Resigning, Don’t Intend to Testify in Congress
Insufficient evidence of conspiracy, did not reach determination on obstruction but couldn’t charge anyway.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller made a public statement about his Russian probe. His last public statement came out in March 2017 when then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him to lead the Russian investigation.
He released his report on April 18. It showed that Russia tried to interfere with our 2016 election, but found no collusion between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Summary of Mueller’s statement? READ THE REPORT.
Mueller has remained mostly silent since he released his report. His office spoke out on Tuesday to deny information in Michael Wolff’s new book that claims Mueller drafted indictments against Trump.
Mueller said he is resigning from the DOJ to return to a private life. He chose to speak out since he completed his investigation and will now close the office.
Mueller basically explained his report. He reinforced the Constitutional stance that a president cannot have an indictment while in office. He also stressed that his office did not make a determination about whether Trump committed a crime and had insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.
In other words, the office could not even consider charging Trump with a crime. He said that if he hadn’t committed a crime they would have said so. They also would have said they exonerated him.
He also said that any testimony would not go beyond this report. The report is his testimony.
He praised those in the special counsel office and also did not question Attorney General Willian Barr’s good faith in the way he released the report.
Mueller did not take any questions. He stated that this will be his only statement about the report, which basically squashes the Democrats hope for him to testify in front of Congress.
He ended his conference with this message:
I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments, that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. And that allegation deserves the attention of every American.
I’m seeing mixed reactions on social media, which also happened when he released the report. The left interpreted his message as code to Congress to impeach Trump while the right celebrates that he reiterated his report that he found no collusion and could not reach a determination on obstruction of justice.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
I suspect Mueller will be very guarded in his statement. He’s managed the unique feat of p*ssing everyone off to the point where no one trusts him anymore.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. (*Smirks and rolls eyes*)
from just hearing soundbites of it:
sounds like Mueller’s statement is the circular argument of “we really really really want to indict, but we cannot because we have both a lack of sufficient evidence and a lack of an impeachable offense”
it was basically a long winded statement that tries to punt it all to the Democrat controlled House knowing full well a Senate conviction will never happen + any future investigation on the FBI and DOJ’s end is now at a close due to AG Barr basically calling his whole investigation a sham
which it was
He reinforced the Constitutional stance that a president cannot have an indictment while in office.
A strange way to dance around the question nobody actually asked. The D’rats are interested in a rationale for impeachment; they don’t care much about an indictment. They need evidence of a crime (aside from the crime of not being a Democrat, of course) if they hope to get any Republican votes in the Senate, but their goal is to get Orange Man Bad out of office, not to put him in jail. So an actual hard-copy indictment is irrelevant. Partially convincing smears or innuendos would be ideal. And Mueller tried to give them some with his vague natter about “obstruction”.
Mueller is trying to say, no, I couldn’t indict the President because that’s not legally possible, but I’m tossing enough chum into the D’rat shark tank for you to pretend that you have a justification for impeachment, maybe even enough for an indictment if I was legally able to do that, which I’m not—but you are, after you manage to impeach him, hint, hint, nudge, nudge. In other words, “Mueller” is from an Old German word meaning “sneaky weasel”.
Nothing changed today – Democrats in the House are still going to do what they were always going to do, Trump is still going to do what he was always going to do. This is just a bunch of blah blah blah to feed the news cycle, and to tell the House Dems that he wasn’t going to submit himself to any questioning.
Oh, something changed. The Dems have been braying that subpoenas are the Most Supreme Power and that all Trump officials that received them should be crawling on their bellies to be grilled by the House committee. Now to have Mueller basically flip off the same committee and hear the Dems whining about it is music to my ears.
tldr; If Mueller had the evidence to charge obstruction, he would have. He didn’t, so he didn’t. There was no “exoneration” because the DOJ doesn’t do that (except in the rare death penalty cases where they do a “Whoops, we were going to kill you but not now. Go home.”)
Mueller said the exact opposite. He said that even if he had the evidence to charge obstruction he wouldn’t have done so, and that had he been able to exonerate the president he would have done so. (Note that he did not say he had the evidence to charge, just that he wouldn’t have charged even if he had it.)
But Mueller DID make his bizarro “If we were confident the President did not commit a crime we would have said so” comment – a statement destined to go down in infamy along with “legally accurate” and “depends on the meaning of the word ‘is’”.
As one wag put it: Mueller was declaring Trump “not not guilty”, a frightening thing for a Federal prosecutor to get away with. Who in their right mind would trust any journalist or politician who thought what Mueller did today was perfectly acceptable?
Your’e exactly right. It’s like saying, “I saw you driving in a 55 mph zone, but I didn’t have the lights and sirens to pull you over”, and implying that that is proof that you were speeding.
Ken Star charged clinton with 11 counts while he was a sitting president and AG Barr said that Mueller could have done the same thing. His intent was to push the cowardly Dims to the impeachment route. Barr has also said that Mueller could have charged Trump with any crime he found and that his pointing to the DoJ rule about indicting a sitting president would have not made any difference to the charges. Mueller’s job was to find the crimes and then recommend indictment to the AG. He pulled a comey and actions that have no precedent and turned the law of innocent until proven guilty upside down. Nowhere is it written that the special counsel’s job is to exonerate anyone. It is to find whether or not a crime was committed and recommend indictment or not, period.
Mueller sure took a long time to say nothing.
The lying scum Bob Mueller began his presentation with a lie: that his investigation showed that the Russians hacked the DNC computers. Oh yeah, where is your proof? Did you even examine the DNC’s, or Hillary’s, computers? Also, the lying scum Mueller said there was not “sufficient evidence” to charge any crimes. Okay, wise guy, even so, what shred of evidence, no matter how “insufficient,” did you discover and reported that showed the possible commission of any crime by the President? Other than proving that you and your co-conspirators are a bunch of biased, unethical shysters, you have zero against the President, and you are too crooked and scheming to admit it.
I’m with you, Connivin. I have looked and looked and looked, read everything I could get my hands on. I have found NO evidence it was the Russians who gave those emails to Assange, none.
Is Mueller supposed to be smart? Or is he a fool, led around by the nose by those 17 Trump-haters he hired?
I hope he is forced to testify. Remember, Mueller was head of the FBI in 2012 when all this domestic spying started, when Susan Rice allowed or was made to allow those 5 contractors to commit unmasking felonies so they could spy on Obama’s political opponents.
I’m not sure Mueller accomplished nothing today. He stuck the knife in by using a particularly nasty and oblique way of implying Trump was guilty of obstruction, i.e., we know he did it but we couldn’t prove it. Besides, you can’t indict a sitting president. It’s unconstitutional.
The “Russians hacked the DNC servers” meme is going to be touted more and more in the coming months. This myth has been floating around for the last three years, without any real evidence, as a “support” for the Trump-Russia Collusion narrative which was the basis for the subsequent surveillance of the Trump campaign. No FBI report has even been produced which states that the FBI developed any evidence, on its own, to support this claim. The “evidence” that Russia “hacked” the DNC servers came, exclusively from Crowdstrike, with no FBI corroboration.
The myth ill be a keystone to support the theory that Russia was an active threat to the 2016 elections.
He basically read his own report on TV. He said nothing new but he knows it will consume a week’s worth of news to distract for what is about to be de-classified.
just a reminder that Ken Starr pointed out 11 impeachable offenses that Bill Clinton committed
Apples and oranges. Starr worked for himself and reported to Congress; Mueller worked for and reported to the AG. Starr’s job included looking for impeachable offenses; Mueller’s job was to look only for indictable offenses.
Mueller’s job was to
look only forfabricate indictable offenses.FIFY
The criminal Mueller failed simply because there was NOTHING.
Unreal. What a perversion of the law by an unethical piece of garbage. No one is required to prove their own innocence and an ethical prosecutor does not issue comments if he/she has no evidence to support charges. Let alone a prosecutor charged with conducting a confidential investigation to issue a confidential report. Truly a piece of sh*t.
What Mueller failed to make clear is exactly what his mandate was, with regard to the powers of his office. A prosecutor is supposed to investigate potential crimes and decide if probable cause exists that a criminal act has occurred. Then he makes a determination as to whether such charges could be successfully prosecuted. He failed to honor that mandate.
In the Clinton Servergate case, while Comey did not directly state that sufficient probable cause existed to charge Hillary Clinton fir a violation of law, in that case, he set out a prima facia case that such PC existed. Then, he went so far as to specifically point out that, regardless of the evidence to support charging and, possibly, convicting Clinton, no prosecutor would prosecute such a charge under the circumstance.
Mueller, et al, attempted to do something similar to Trump, with regard to obstruction. However, Mueller failed to lay out a prima facia case for the existence of probable cause for any charge of obstruction, unlike Comey in Servergate. He inferred, though did not clearly state, that, even if such PC existed, a sitting President could not be charged with a violation of law. This was only an inference, and one largely made after the report was released, as this was never stated in the report itself. In fact, he punted the whole obstruction case to the AG, without a recommendation.
So, Mueller can attempt to spin the results of his investigation anyway that he likes. But, the result of the ivestigation was that there was simply NO there, there. No collusion. No obstruction. A big honking nothing-burger.
WSe all enjoy a presumption of innocence under law, and failure to charge and also convict leaves some innoncent.
Damn typos, leaves one innocent.
Shorter Mueller:
1. “Trump is guilty but I have no evidence that would stand up in an actual trial.”
2. “Please impeach and remove Trump, but don’t ask me to testify in Congress. I will look bad when I can’t back up what I have accused him of.”
Billy Boy committed crimes and was investigated for it. Trump did not commit any crime. The investigation was to try to find a crime that never happened. And Mueller proved that point after a presidential prostate exam that lasted almost two years and cost taxpayers over $30 million. The Dems now want to climb up into Trump’s colon looking for any Schiff they can find to successfully prove that Orange Man is bad. My advise to the Dems – STOP DIGGING!!!
2 years ago I said Mueller was a crook. Nothing has changed. Mueller is a lowlife corrupt scumbag. His “performance” today puts any doubt about that to rest. ANYONE with a passing knowledge of our legal system knows what Mueller did. He’s scum. He doesn’t give a damn about freedom and democracy, the rule of law.
mueller’s afraid not of the dems, but of what questions the repubs would demand answers for.
I don’t care who this creepy jerk is. In an impeachment trial, both sides get to be heard and call witnesses. This ignorant, corrupt fool will not only be called to testify by the defense, but every single one of his investigators will. He is not an “attorney”. They are all witnesses at that point and must authenticate every bit of evidence under examination. And then recross.
It’s the reason Pelosi is wisely holding back. Many on the left forget that in criminal trial the other side gets a say. Unlike the left’s normal form of discussion where they speak and no one else gets to talk.
Trump’s lawyers will be able to cite indications that the person(s) colluding with Russia to influence US elections were all Democrats. That the Special Counsel was manned by Anti-Trumpers with one goal. That many avenues of investigation were foreclosed with NO reason given.
All they have to do is start subpoenaing ppl and watch the rats scuttle down the lines to the shore. We won’t need Mitch to shut down the trial. It will collapse on it’s own. No Democrats will want the public to hear any of the testimony and evidence of what happened.
Subpoena HIM!!!!!!!
To think that Mueller, this piece of manure, ran the FBI for 12 years.
I wonder how many innocent people he and his crew illegally put in jail to rot.