Barr tried to exonerate Trump

The redacted version of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report made one thing quite clear: Attorney General William Barr has gone out of his way to try to exonerate the president. But Barr’s comments about obstruction of justice have been deeply flawed — and at odds with the spirit of the regulations governing this type of politically sensitive investigation by a special counsel.

Mueller noted in the report that his office decided not to make a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” on whether Trump had obstructed justice, because the Justice Department has a policy not to indict a sitting president. But Barr has misleadingly implied that the longstanding policy wasn’t any part of the reason for that decision. That is not the case. Mueller says right at the outset of the report’s second volume, where Barr wouldn’t have missed it, that he felt bound by that policy: “We determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.”

So Trump’s claim, based on Barr’s spin, that the Mueller report exonerates him is flatly untrue. Mueller said, in effect, Because I’m investigating a sitting president, I cannot indict him, and therefore I won’t call him a criminal even if he’s guilty as sin. He also explicitly wrote that if “the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state . . . However, we are unable to reach that judgment.” Mueller couldn’t indict the president, but he could have cleared him. He didn’t.

Barr has at times appeared to take the position that a prosecutor must prove an underlying crime to bring an obstruction charge. But there is nothing in the text or purpose of the obstruction statutes that suggests this. Obstruction is a separate and independent offense. It has to be, or else someone could commit a crime, destroy all the evidence, then turn around and invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. If proof of an underlying crime were necessary to charge obstruction of justice, a suspect could make himself un-indictable through his own misconduct — indeed, his own obstruction. As Mueller says in his report, “The obstruction statutes do not require proof of such a crime.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/barr-tried-to-exonerate-trump-thats-not-how-the-special-counsel-rules-work/2019/04/19/12801474-6229-11e9-bfad-36a7eb36cb60_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_source=reddit.com&utm_term=.3bf1ca6b740b