National Review’s Andrew McCarthy does some Jedi mind trickery in order to twist the conclusion of the IG report into a rationale to end the Mueller investigation into obstruction.
Although McCarthy rejects the IG report’s conclusion, he says it logically leads to ending the Mueller investigation in obstruction.
…if this is the Justice Department’s position, then Special Counsel Robert Mueller has no business investigating the president for obstruction.
What he argues is that for the FBI officials, the IG report takes it as a matter of the benefit of the doubt that they acted without bias unless there is direct evidence that their personal bias led to biased professional actions. In other words, just the presence of bias doesn’t lead to the conclusion that actions following upon that bias were themselves biased.
Mueller would apparently circumvent the president’s constitutional defense through an untenable theory of corrupt intent. That is, the special counsel would posit that if the president takes a lawful action for an arguably corrupt purpose, he can be accused of obstruction. We have countered that this is specious. There is no doubt that a president can legitimately be accused of obstruction based on clearly criminal actions (e.g., witness tampering — see: the Nixon and Clinton impeachment proceedings). But if a president’s actions are lawful on their face, it is not the place of a subordinate executive officer, such as a prosecutor, to question the chief executive’s motives — especially under circumstances in which the president does not need any reason to take the action at issue.
BUT if that’s the reasoning that leads to the conclusion in the IG report, it should also lead to the same conclusion in the investigation into obstruction of justice for Trump. What a nice little bow he tied.
The thing is, McCarthy says he rejected wholesale the conclusion of the IG report, and so have most Trump supporters. Secondly, even if you think this is a good enough reasoning to end Mueller’s probe into obstruction, that doesn’t mean he needs to end his investigation into Russian collusion and interference in the election.
Finally, the problem with this reasoning is that we don’t know what evidence Mueller has for obstruction of justice – perhaps his evidence is greater than that in the IG report. But we *do* know all the evidence about bias in the FBI because we have it in the IG report. So perhaps we should wait to see what Mueller says in his report before we say it’s not worth pursuing? Nah, forget that, let’s all #MAGA!!!