On Thursday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” the host discusses the findings of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into allegations of the 2016 Trump campaign colluding with the Russians. Video and partial transcript below.
What Mueller did here is so, so wrong. It is so beyond the scope of his job. It is so wrong to politicize the federal government in this way. So, what exactly did he do?
The key takeaway, the big line, from this press conference, is that Mueller is not “confident that the president clearly did not commit a crime.” Since when has that been the standard of justice in this country? Since when has that been the standard of innocence or guilt? In this country typically, we would say that you are innocent until proven guilty. Now according to Bob Mueller, you are guilty until he is confident that you clearly did not commit a crime. That’s the implication here.
Bob Mueller is not confident that the president did not clearly commit a crime. OK, so did he commit a crime? Well no we’re not going to conclude that. So, you’re not saying he committed a crime? Right, I’m not saying he committed a crime. So, then you’re saying there’s no actionable evidence that he committed a crime? Well, yes, but I’m not confident that he didn’t clearly did not commit a crime.
Now his defense here, he comes on and says that under DOJ guidelines he can’t indict the president. So then why was he investigating this obstruction in the first place? Why did he write 200 pages about obstruction? I know this is very confusing and it’s gone on for years now.
We hear about the Mueller investigation, the (Russians), the collusion… what was Bob Mueller tasked with doing in the first place?
The entire reason that Bob Mueller was appointed and the entire reason he has this investigation, is to determine the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Which he did, by the way, he indicted a bunch of Russians, he found certain companies in Russia that were working to shift the balance of the 2016 election and working to advance multiple candidates. His job was to identify Russian interference. He says explicitly, he is not allowed to indict a sitting president. So, if he’s not allowed to do that then he’s not going to conclude that a president committed a crime. So then, really, he shouldn’t have been investigating this in the first place.
He overstepped the bounds of his office. Why did he investigate obstruction if he couldn’t do anything with it? He investigated obstruction because he hates Donald Trump and he really wishes that Donald Trump didn’t win in 2016 and he wants to do the work of congressional Democrats for them to help them impeach him.
What else could it have been? What else could he have been doing? He can’t take any action even if he did find sufficient evidence of the crime of collusion which by the way the Attorney General William Barr and the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein did not find evidence of obstruction. They did not find sufficient evidence of obstruction to act. So even on that front, the DOJ declared there wasn’t sufficient evidence.
Now, what really happened here? Mueller punted on the question of obstruction. Then the attorney general and the deputy attorney general came to the conclusion, as was their job, and the conclusion they came to was that there was not sufficient evidence of obstruction.
Some people are saying, well why didn’t they leave the question open? Because the Department of Justice is not a freshman seminar at a college in the middle of America. The purpose of the Department of Justice is not to foster intellectual debate and engage in hypotheticals and just leave questions out there and you can form your own conclusions. The Department of Justice is the Department of Justice. It is there to prosecute, and it is there to effect justice. You don’t get to just leave academic questions hanging in the air. You have to come to a conclusion. So, they came to that conclusion and Bob Mueller is really upset that the report that he gave out did not have the political effect that he obviously wanted, which was to hurt the president.
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