Don't say Trump is exonerated. It's too soon for that

To listen to the Trump administration right now, you would think that Robert Mueller has exonerated the president, found Hillary Clinton and the liberal media guilty of treason, and definitively proven once and for all that Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd really was the largest in world history.

Indeed, the initial rollout of Mueller’s conclusions has been a public relations triumph for the president, mainly because it was in the hands of Trump’s hand-picked attorney general, William Barr. In the four-page letter which Barr delivered to Congress, less than 100 words are quoted directly from Mueller’s report. But while these words certainly tell us something, they hide much more than they reveal. And Barr’s decision to exonerate Trump on the charge of obstruction of justice – something Mueller himself declined to do – likewise raises a suite of questions about his reasoning and motives.

As might be expected, the president’s defenders are ready to declare the case closed on that basis. Trump himself is reported to be out for revenge and plans to call for the resignation of journalists who he says led a witch hunt against him. More disturbingly, some commentators outside the Trump bubble appear to share the president’s fury at the media. In a much-shared piece, the writer Matt Taibbi has even described the Russia story as “this generation’s WMD”, alleging a pattern of errors and exaggerations which could destroy the reputation of the media forever.

Such reasoning is absurd. To start with the obvious, the conclusion that Trump has been exonerated is premature. Mueller “did not establish” that Trump campaign officials colluded or coordinated with Russia, which is a legal term meaning he failed to find admissible evidence proving it beyond a reasonable doubt. This is a very high bar, and was always going to be. It is certainly far lower than the bar for impeachment or damning an administration in the eyes of reasonable public opinion. The fact Mueller failed to bring charges does not mean he failed to find evidence of highly disturbing conduct, and until we have the full report we won’t know what that evidence is.

In the other main strand of his investigation, Mueller explicitly did not exonerate the president of the charge of obstruction of justice. The evidence he considers in reaching this conclusion includes, according to Barr’s letter, matters which have not yet been the subject of public reporting. Especially given Barr’s own quaint legal views on obstruction of justice, his decision to clear Trump of this charge is grossly insufficient. Again, we need to see the evidence.

As well as being premature, the conclusion that the Mueller probe really was a witch hunt after all represents a disturbing surrender to the Trumpian worldview.

In the last three years, Trump and his hand-picked senior aides have engaged in a pattern of behavior which was at once sinister and baffling. They said “I love it” when offered Russian government assistance in the election. They shared polling data with a man connected to Russian intelligence. They pursued a business deal in Moscow at the same time they were running for election. They openly called for a hostile power to intervene in the election. They echoed that hostile power’s propaganda and cozied up to the Kremlin in a manner which was completely contrary to their domestic political interests and the national interests of the United States. Throughout it all, they lied about what they were doing as easily as they breathed.

At the same time, they and their surrogates – even as their lies were uncovered – attacked the very idea that they ought to be subject to the rule of law. They lied to the investigators about their lies. They called federal agents executing lawful warrants “stormtroopers”. The president himself fired or tried to fire those who would not be loyal to him over what he called “this Russia thing”, and then admitted doing so. At the same time, a Republican-controlled Congress made a mockery of its constitutional duty of oversight, refusing to carry out meaningful investigations of the administration.

To suggest that the critics of Trump ought to have ignored or downplayed this behavior – without precedent in the modern presidency – is absurd. And to suggest they now ought to issue a mea culpa based on a short letter by Trump’s attorney general is so absurd that it beggars explanation.

Worst of all, any sudden rush to condemn those who pointed out the foregoing facts, in the media and outside of it, plays squarely into Trump’s hands. He has attempted all along to move the goalposts so that anything short of outright criminality was meaningless. And he has weathered the many revelations of actual criminality – or corrupt and immoral behavior which fell short of being criminal – because the revelations came in dribs and drabs and were quickly pushed from the news cycle by his mendacious attacks on his enemies.

The bottom line is this: even if the Mueller report contained only the facts that are publicly known so far, it would have been grounds for impeachment in saner political times. And it likely contains much more. Given this, the administration’s continued attacks on the media for reporting what we all saw with our own eyes is designed to obfuscate what is already known and inoculate the public against what is to come. It would behoove true defenders of the rule of law and a free press not to make their job any easier.