WASHINGTON, March 24, 2019 – President Donald Trump on Sunday claimed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report totally exonerates him after his own attorney General told Congress that the report does not do so.
“There was no collusion with Russia. There was no obstruction, and — none whatsoever. And it was a complete and total exoneration,” Trump said while speaking to reporters before departing Palm Beach, Florida on Air Force One.
The President called Mueller’s investigation “an illegal takedown that failed” and hoped that “somebody” would begin to investigate “the other side” in response.
Trump’s claims of exoneration came shortly after Attorney General William Barr released a letter to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees which summarized the conclusions contained in the report Mueller delivered to him on Friday.
Regarding the possibility that Trump committed obstruction of justice by his attempts to undermine the investigation into whether he or his associates conspired with foreign nationals to interfere in the 2016 election, Barr’s letter quoted a sentence written by Mueller which directly contradicted Trump’s claims.
“While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” Mueller wrote.
However, the Attorney General noted that Mueller had declined to make a “traditional prosecutorial judgement” as to whether any of Trump’s actions — including his firing of former FBI Director James Comey — warranted obstruction of justice charges, and had instead chose to “describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions.”
Barr was nominated for his second stint as attorney general after authoring a legal memorandum arguing that the President is incapable of committing obstruction of justice.
Barr explained that after consulting with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”