Mueller’s Report: Trump’s Vindication?
Curt Mills
Donald Trump, United States
The culmination of the special counsel’s two-year investigation has some asking where the time went.
Mueller’s Report: Trump’s Vindication?
“There’s a difference between exoneration and vindication,” liberal legal analyst and George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley said on CBS news Thursday, following Attorney General Bill Barr’s press conference ahead of the release of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s long-awaited report. So President Donald Trump has, at a bare minimum, been vindicated?
The formal release of Mueller’s report was similarly sparing to the White House. Hundreds of pages confirmed what the American public and the world knew prior to Thursday: the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election, and as Attorney General Barr said, “Russian operatives… did not have the cooperation of President Trump or the Trump campaign.”
Also largely extinguished Thursday was a cottage industry that speculated that Barr—a decades-long friend of Mueller’s—was in some way obfuscating from the meat of Mueller’s findings in his letter to Congress in late March. Barr, as promised, released a redacted version of the full report in under a month.
The redactions relate to ongoing legal matters—such as the prosecutions of Julian Assange and Roger Stone. None of the redactions relate to the invocation of the president’s executive privilege—the White House, though shown the report ahead of time, did not assert the privilege at any point, reported Barr.
