The Robert Mueller hearing was mostly uneventful but his one comment became made controversial. Robert was appointed in May 2017 as a special counsel to investigate links between the Russian government and the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. He appeared to tell the House Judiciary Committee that he would have indicted President Donald Trump on charges of obstruction of justice if he hadn’t been barred by a policy from the Department of Justice that prevents federal prosecutors from charging a sitting president with a crime.
However later during his testimony he clarified, “As we say in the report, and as I said at the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.” Mueller said that trump could be charged with obstruction of justice after he leaves office if the prosecutors believed the facts laid out in Mueller’s 448 page report that warrants it. Jeremy Paul, a professor in the school of law at Northeastern University, wondered if the statute of limitations would prevent Trump from being charged after the end of his term or if he is re-elected for 4 more years.
Trump told the media that he thought the testimony was a disaster for the Democrats and they lost big today. Paul criticised Democrats who questioned Robert Mueller for reading isolated passages from his report, instead of telling a compelling story. He also called out Republicans for failing to refute any of the evidence in Mueller’s report and instead undermining the credibility of Mueller’s investigation.
“Mueller’s argument during his testimony, and in the report, is that special counsel can decide not to indict because that’s fair, but it can’t say it wants to indict if it’s not allowed,” says Paul. “Mueller is coherent on this. If he found evidence but couldn’t indict, he really had little choice.”
Paul doesn’t think the hearing will change anything.Some Democrats will continue to build the case that Trump should be impeached for obstructing justice, but how that plays out will depend on how the coverage of the testimony develops over the next few days.
Mayuri Talgaonkar