in Legal Scoops, Politics, Trump Administration

Dershowitz: Robert Mueller Completely Bungled Obstruction Report

by Andrew April 22, 2019, 5:04 pm 926 Comments

Democrats are in a bit of a bind right now. After telling their voters for two years that Donald Trump was an evil traitor who sold his country down the river for the promise of the presidency, they watched numbly as Robert Mueller delivered the bad news: That whole Russian collusion theory…yeah, it turns out that was BS. No one involved with the Trump campaign helped the Russians meddle in the election. There was no conspiracy. There was no collusion. Sorry, guys. Hate to leave you hanging out here in the wind. Wish there was something I could do.

But wait, maybe there is!

And it was with this spirit that Mueller wrote Volume II of his report, which is all about President Trump’s attempts to “obstruct justice.” Justice, in this instance, being a baseless witch hunt into a fictitious crime, but you know, justice nonetheless. Now, seeing as how the president was always fully empowered to fire Mueller and send him back into retirement, we’re not sure how he could have “attempted” to obstruct the investigation. Did he tell people to lie to Mueller and his team? Nope. So what then? Oh, he said some mean things on Twitter and he ranted at his attorney general. Cool. Let’s lock him in prison and throw away the key.

In a version of the Mueller report due to be published on Amazon in the coming days, famed attorney Alan Dershowitz concludes that one of the biggest problems with the report is that Robert Mueller apparently doesn’t understand the legal nature of obstruction. Or, if he understands it, he fails to follow the logic to its inexorable conclusion: That the president could not have obstructed justice by the actions he took. Simply by virtue of BEING the president, he had every right to make every move that he did.

“The Mueller Report correctly concludes that there are no Supreme Court decisions or even Department of Justice positions that directly resolve the issue of whether ‘the president’s exercises of his constitutional authority to terminate an FBI director and to close investigations’ can constitutionally constitute an obstruction of justice,” writes Dershowitz. “The report also acknowledges the principle that ‘general statutes must be read as not applying to the president if they do not expressly apply where application would arguably limit the president’s constitutional role.’”

“Those principles,” Dershowitz argues, “should end the matter. In the absence of a contrary precedent, the general obstruction of justice statute should not be deemed applicable to the commission of an act by a president authorized by the Constitution, even if it was self-serving. This conclusion applies not only to the firing of Comey, but to all actions taken by President Trump pursuant to constitutional authority under Article II.”

That’s it in a nutshell. Whatever Trump did or didn’t do, it is up to the voters to decide whether or not it is tolerable. Fact is, he stayed within the confines of the law. If the American people find it sufficiently distasteful, they can vote for whatever quasi-socialist the Democrats put up against him next year. But to pretend there is any ground here for impeachment proceedings is wishful thinking at best.

But then, the left has been doing a lot of that for the last two years.

Dershowitz: Robert Mueller Completely Bungled Obstruction Report

Written by Andrew

926 Comments