WASHINGTON (AP) Special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence President Donald Trumps campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election but reached no conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice. That brought a hearty claim of vindication from Trump but set the stage for new rounds of political and legal fighting.
The battle began Monday as White House aides and allies blanketed television news broadcasts to trumpet the findings and claim that Trump has been the victim in a probe that never should have started.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Trump will let Attorney General William Barr decide whether the special counsels Russia report should be publicly released, though she adds that hes more than happy for any of this stuff to come out.
Trump cheered the Sunday outcome but also laid bare his resentment after two years of investigations that have shadowed his administration. Its a shame that our country has had to go through this. To be honest, its a shame that your president has had to go through this, he said.
Democrats pointed out that Mueller found evidence for and against obstruction and demanded to see his full report. They insisted that even the summary by the presidents attorney general hardly put him in the clear.
Muellers conclusions, summarized by Barr in a four page letter to Congress, represented a victory for Trump on a key question that has hung over his presidency from the start whether his campaign worked with Russia to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
That was further good news for the president on top of the Justice Departments earlier announcement that Mueller had wrapped his investigation without new indictments. That could deflate the hopes of Democrats in Congress and on the 2020 campaign trail that incriminating findings from Mueller would hobble the presidents agenda and re-election bid.
But while Mueller was categorical in ruling out criminal collusion, he was more circumspect on presidential obstruction of justice. Despite Trumps claim of total exoneration, Mueller did not draw a conclusion one way or the other on whether he sought to stifle the Russia investigation through his actions including the firing of former FBI director James Comey.
According to Barrs summary, Mueller set out evidence on both sides of the question and stated that while this report does not conclude the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
Barr, who was nominated by Trump in December, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller in May 2017 and oversaw much of his work, went further in Trumps favor.
The attorney general said he and Rosenstein had determined that Muellers evidence was insufficient to prove in court that Trump had committed obstruction of justice to hamper the probe. Barr has previously voiced a broad view of presidential powers, and in an unsolicited memo last June he cast doubt on whether the president could have obstructed justice through acts like firing his FBI director that he was legally empowered to take.
Barr said their decision was based on the evidence uncovered by Mueller and not affected by Justice Department legal opinions that say a sitting president cannot be indicted.
Muellers team examined a series of actions by the president in the last two years to determine if he intended obstruction. Those include his firing of Comey one week before Muellers appointment, his public and private haranguing of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation because of his work on the campaign, his request of Comey to end an investigation into Michael Flynn, the White Houses first national security adviser, and his drafting of an incomplete explanation about his oldest sons meeting with a Russian lawyer during the campaign.
Muellers findings absolve Trump on the question of colluding with Russia but dont entirely remove the legal threats the president and associates are facing. Federal prosecutors in New York, for instance, are investigating hush-money payments made to two women during the campaign who say they had sex with the president. Trumps former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, implicated Trump in campaign finance violations when he pleaded guilty last year.
The special counsels investigation did not come up empty-handed. It ensnared nearly three dozen people, senior Trump campaign operatives among them. The probe illuminated Russias assault on the American political system, painted the Trump campaign as eager to exploit the release of hacked Democratic emails to hurt Hillary Clinton and exposed lies by Trump aides aimed at covering up their Russia-related contacts.
