Very disturbing, from Slate "How William Barr Won" [View all]

[NRaleighLiberal]

At every step in the investigation, the attorney general used Mueller’s ethics against him.
By WILLIAM SALETAN

JULY 26, 201911:42 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/mueller-hearing-william-barr-trump-investigation-winner.html

Why is President Donald Trump getting away with obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation? There are many answers: Republican corruption, Democratic incompetence, and the inability of Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, to prove an underlying crime. But one more reason is that Mueller has been outmaneuvered and betrayed by the man Trump appointed to end the investigation: Attorney General William Barr. Mueller has bent over backward to be fair to Trump. Barr, choosing loyalty to Trump over loyalty to country, has ruthlessly protected the president.

Testifying on Wednesday before two House committees, Mueller shied away from questions about impeachment. His job, he explained, was to investigate the facts and deliver a report to the attorney general. Anything else was beyond his purview. Democrats asked Mueller whether Trump campaign officials had betrayed their country when they communicated with WikiLeaks about Democratic emails hacked by Russia. They asked whether Americans should be concerned that three senior Trump advisers had “eagerly sought a foreign adversary’s help to win elections.” Mueller refused to say.

The former special counsel also refused to draw factual conclusions. Didn’t his report show that Trump had lied about a lucrative construction project in Moscow? Didn’t Trump’s dangling of pardons discourage witnesses from cooperating with the investigation? Mueller declined to answer. He wouldn’t affirm even the most obvious truth: that Russia’s election interference affected some people’s voting decisions. When Democrats tried to spin the evidence, Mueller shot them down. Responding to one lawmaker’s comment that “sanctions relief was discussed” at the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Mueller retorted: “Yes, but it was not a main subject.”

Again and again, Democrats recited facts from Mueller’s report, hoping he would endorse their conclusions. Didn’t his findings about the Trump Tower meeting add up to a conspiracy? Didn’t Trump’s pressure on then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions to abort the investigation in 2017—and on then–White House counsel Don McGahn to write a false witness statement in 2018—prove obstruction of justice? Each time, Mueller rejected the political script, stipulating that his affirmation of the cited facts didn’t mean he agreed with the lawmakers’ characterizations.

Mueller’s integrity makes him a sterling investigator but a lousy political combatant. On March 22, he submitted his 448-page report to Barr, laying out evidence that Trump had obstructed justice but declining to state that conclusion. Barr responded by hijacking the report. Instead of digesting it or releasing the summaries Mueller had drafted for public release, the attorney general issued a letter on March 24 declaring, without explanation, that the evidence was “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”


snip

last part

And what is Mueller’s reward for these scruples? During his testimony, Republicans accused him of bias against Trump. Then, at a press conference afterward, they crowed that Mueller had trashed the Democrats’ talking points against the president. In the hearings, Democrats had “laid out every possibility they could for obstruction,” said Rep. Doug Collins, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “And Mr. Mueller looked at ’em and said … ‘I don’t agree with your theory.’ That should tell you a lot right there.”

It certainly does. It explains, to a large extent, why Trump is off the hook. Barr is playing politics, and Mueller isn’t. Even a Bronze Star Marine can be fragged.


Read it all...so pissed off......