Robert Mueller, despite what your man Donald and his cohorts say, is a lifelong Republican.

He’s also old school, and rather than tweet incessantly about how hard his job is, and how he doesn’t get the credit he deserves, he worked on the task given to him and released his report after two years on the job.

You’ve probably heard Trump talk about a complete and total exoneration, but of course, that wasn’t even close to the truth.

With the Mueller Report being debated, and misinterpreted, and misrepresented, and with calls for Mueller to appear before Congress, he eventually decided to break his silence with his first public statement in two years.

If you’re so inclined, you can watch his full statement below:

Too long, didn’t watch? Here’s the bit that those who aren’t Team Trump will point to:

MUELLER: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” pic.twitter.com/FTSsPuiDje

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 29, 2019

One more time – “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” 

Let’s get the inevitable tweet out of the way:

Bit of a pivot from “NO COLLUSION NO OBSTRUCTION TOTAL EXONERATION”, but at least it didn’t contain any spelling errors (just his insistence on the capitalisation of random words).

Let’s go to the Daily Beast for more of the standout moments:

…Mueller broke more than two years of silence on Wednesday to address the central mystery of his investigation: why he did not make a determination about whether President Trump broke the law.

Mueller said it was because his hands were tied by Justice Department policy that forbids indictment of a sitting president—a statement already being interpreted as an invitation for Congress to impeach Trump.

“Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider,” he said in a surprise press conference at DOJ headquarters.

The special counsel investigation reported 10 episodes of possible obstruction-of-justice offenses allegedly committed by Trump, including the president’s failed efforts to fire Mueller. At the press conference, Mueller said the lack of an official charge of misconduct against Trump should not be interpreted as an exoneration—as Trump and his allies have endlessly claimed.

I mean, that’s pretty clear. He’s saying there was no way, because of policy, that he could charge Trump with a crime, and stated clearly that they couldn’t clear Trump of a crime.

Here are three important takeaways from the statement, and a look at what comes next, via FiveThirtyEight:

Mueller quietly rebuked Attorney General William Barr, repeating that he did not exonerate the president

Underneath the polite, straightforward summary of his findings, Mueller poked holes in Barr’s presentation of his findings in March. In contrast to Barr, who said he had concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge President Trump with obstruction of justice, Mueller said that if his team “had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

Mueller may have realised congressional testimony could undermine his credibility

Testifying before Congress was always going to be a tricky tightrope walk for Mueller, who has so far managed to produce a report that majorities of Republicans and Democrats think is fair — even though…there’s deep disagreement between the parties about whether the report actually showed that Trump interfered with the investigation in a way that amounted to obstruction of justice.

Given the partisan rift about what the report actually concluded, it would have been hard for Mueller to avoid undermining the report’s credibility among some segment of Americans if he opined about it at length.

Congress is now in the driver’s seat

House Democrats have been pushing for Mueller to testify, but now that he’s publicly announced that he doesn’t want to, the ball is even more firmly planted in Congress’s court. And this could complicate [Nancy] Pelosi’s [below] efforts to tamp down an impeachment push and intensify party infighting about whether starting impeachment proceedings would hurt Democrats electorally…

By emphasizing that he was barred from pursuing charges against the president by Justice Department policies, Mueller may have given Democrats who support impeachment a little more ammunition than they had before. But he also made it clear that he’s not going to offer more guidance to the Democrats than he already has. He wrote the report, and now it’s up to Congress to figure out what to do with his findings.

Go for the jugular, you cowards. Do you think Trump ascended to the White House by playing nice and worrying about protocol and decorum?

There is obviously the risk that a failed impeachment all but secures another Trump term in office, and four more years of the bumbling buffoon will only further drag America’s name through the mud, but the time has surely come to act.

Robert Mueller did his job, and now it’s time for Congress to do the same.

[sources:dailybeast&fivethirtyeight]