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Comment by dkural | Hacker News Reader

My conclusion is the opposite. The Mueller report was heavily redacted, and misrepresented by AG Barr - precisely because it is so damning. Trump got impeached by congress over the Ukraine scandal later on, again enlisting foreign help. Trump asked a foreign power to help him against a political opponent - the Ukraine facts are not in dispute. Trump's campaign took multiple meetings with Russians bearing emails, and multiple members of his campaign are now in jail. These two facts are also not in dispute.

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> The Mueller report was heavily redacted

So your first argument is essentially "There's proof in the report, we just can't see it"?

> multiple members of his campaign are now in jail.

Don't you think you should mention the fact that they went to jail for reasons that have nothing to do with Russian collusion?

Er, Mueller straight up said "if we could exonerate the President for obstruction of justice, we would. But we can't." So Mueller has admitted that Trump obstructed his investigation, and several members in Trump's circle have gone to jail for _lying to the FBI_.

Not to mention the fact that Mueller's investigation clearly found that Trump's campaign was in contact with Russian agents, knew they favored Trump's campaign, and "welcomed" their help (i.e., foreign interference). This is what the public understands as "collusion". However, "collusion" is not a legal term, "conspiracy" is and has a higher bar of proof. So yes, Trump colluded with Russia, we just couldn't prove that they explicitly conspired since Trump's circle lied for him.

You may find this shocking, but the Mueller report supports none of the substantive claims about Trump's campaign conspiring with Russians and actually contradicts many of them: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/18/robert-mueller-did-not-m...

> Mueller, in addition to concluding that evidence was insufficient to charge any American with crimes relating to Russian election interference, also stated emphatically in numerous instances that there was no evidence – not merely that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction – that key prongs of this three-year-old conspiracy theory actually happened. As Mueller himself put it: “in some instances, the report points out the absence of evidence or conflicts in the evidence about a particular fact or event.”

"If we had confidence the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so."

From the Executive Summary: "Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

It is a lie to suggest that there was "no evidence"; Mueller himself in a public statement literally said there was merely "insufficient evidence" to rise to the bar of conspiracy, contradicting your quote.

> "If we had confidence the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so."

Expecting them to prove a negative in a conspiracy case is laughably absurd. Mueller said that there was not only insufficient evidence for all claims, there was zero evidence for many of the others.

They got Don Gotti, Nixon, and countless other criminals on obstruction. But when the Senate and AG are fully loyal to the president, it suddenly isn't an indictable offense.

> As Mueller himself concluded, a reasonable debate can be conducted on whether Trump tried to obstruct his investigation with corrupt intent. But even on the case of obstruction, the central point looms large over all of it: there was no underlying crime established for Trump to cover-up.

> All criminal investigations require a determination of a person’s intent, what they are thinking and what their goal is. When the question is whether a President sought to kill an Executive Branch investigation – as Trump clearly wanted to do here – the determinative issue is whether he did so because he genuinely believed the investigation to be an unfair persecution and scam, or whether he did it to corruptly conceal evidence of criminality.

> That Mueller could not and did not establish any underlying crimes strongly suggests that Trump acted with the former rather than the latter motive, making it virtually impossible to find that he criminally obstructed the investigation.

If you were innocent of a crime would you really just sit back and watch the government waste $35 million investigating you?

Who are you quoting here?

The Intercept article by Glenn Greenwald linked a few posts up the chain.

> Er, Mueller straight up said "if we could exonerate the President for obstruction of justice, we would. But we can't." So Mueller has admitted that Trump obstructed his investigation

There's a pretty big excluded middle between "We can say with authority that X obstructed" and "We can exonerate X of obstructing".

(Which is not to say that details in Mueller's report don't tend to support the conclusion of obstruction, but Mueller saying that they could exonerate doesn't equate to saying that Trump did obstruct.)

Mueller also said that, if the President did hypothetically obstruct justice, _he would not be able to bring charges_. That is Congress's job, he said.

So, let's say Mueller found ironclad evidence of obstruction. What would he have done? He told us that he would have said exactly what he did. He does not believe it was in his power to bring charges, only present evidence. And then he said "if we could say that the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so." He's speaking like a career lawyer because he is one; he can't outright tell Congress to bring charges.

> There's a pretty big excluded middle between "We can say with authority that X obstructed" and "We can exonerate X of obstructing".

Mueller was following Justice Department policy - he can't even say he thought a crime was committed, despite mountains of evidence, because the department's policy is it will never prosecute the president, so they can't indict, and thus won't ever accuse.

The president could murder someone on live television and department policy would be to say "Doesn't look like anything to me."

> Er, Mueller straight up said "if we could exonerate the President for obstruction of justice, we would. But we can't."

I always found that statement to be bizarre and offensive. You don’t prove someone innocent. You prove someone guilty. Trump doesn’t need Mueller’s exoneration, and a statement like that speaks volumes, to me anyway, about the mindset of the person making it.

> The Mueller report was heavily redacted, and misrepresented by AG Barr

Why would Mueller not say anything to that effect then?

He did: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/29/robert-mueller-wil...

He did.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barr_letter#Reactions

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