Garbo Speaks: Will Congress Listen?

OK, we clear now?

Bob Mueller just said that Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted left him and his team without even the option of charging Donald J. Trump with a crime.

In other words, he wouldn’t — and couldn’t, according to his interpretation of the law — charge Trump with anything, no matter what he found.

He pointedly said that, under the Constitution, a president’s misdeeds — both ordinary criminal behavior and “high crimes and misdemeanors” as defined politically, not legally — are a matter for Congress, if it so decides.

He also explicitly said that his office would have exonerated Trump if they thought he was guiltless, but they didn’t do that because they didn’t think he was. I believe his exact words were that “if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” a sound bite that ought to ring in America’s ears for years to come. Indeed, his written report lists in granular detail ten different instances in which Trump arguably did obstruct justice in ways that rise to the level of a federal crime…..and close to a thousand former federal prosecutors have signed a letter stating that, in their collective professional opinion, Trump would have been indicted on that charge if not for the office he holds. (The written…