Mueller's Report Laid Out a Road Map to Impeachment, But Only Congress Can Drive That Road..

             It's smack-in-the-face obvious that the current Pretender to the Oval Office attempted to obstruct justice. The Mueller report makes that point again and again.

            Acts of obstruction by the Pretender to the Oval Office -- I'm heavily tempted here to use the convenient and telling abbreviation POO -- include hindering a criminal investigation by pressuring others to lie to investigators or conceal facts, and by seeking to have the investigators removed from the job. All of these actions fall squarely under the category of criminal behavior called "criminal obstruction of justice."

            What's not so obvious to almost every one of us who is not a criminal prosecutor or a Constitutional authority is why special investigator Robert Mueller did not charge the Pretender with a crime.

            Mueller's report gives the answer to that question as well, but he states it in lawyerly language. For us non-lawyers, it's fortunate that some commentators familiar with the lingo have provided the translation for us.

            Here's the bottom line: Mueller did not charge the Pretender with committing crimes or seek to indict him because the current federal government policy (authored by the Department of Justice) is that you can't indict a sitting President for a crime -- under any circumstances. You can't charge him with X number of violations of such and such a felonious crimes and bring him to court, as you can to literally anybody else in the country.

            According to the Department of Justice, it's not permitted under our Constitutional system to charge a sitting President with a crime, for what many people believe are sensible reasons. We'll get to these later.

            First, here's a quick consensus summary of what Mueller report analysts had to say on the subject of obstruction.  

            According to Michael A. Cohen, a veteran political columnist for the Boston Globe:

            "...Mueller has laid out clear and unambiguous evidence that the president attempted, on repeated occasions, to interfere with the Russia investigation and obstruct justice."

            Most of us who follow national news, especially in the days after the redacted report was made public, are familiar with these "repeated occasions" on which the Pretender pressured subordinates to lie for him, or to fire Mueller as his investigation probed the Trump campaign-Russian connection during the 2016 Presidential campaign

            The instances include Trump's repeated attempts to have one of his appointees fire Mueller -- attempts that were deflected, the report states, by the President's legal counsel Don McGahn. Trump tired to get other government officials including his staff members to stall or put roadblocks in the way of Mueller's investigators, even urging them to leak "fake news" that would play down his acts of obstruction. 

           He tried to persuade former FBI head James Comey to drop his investigation into guilty campaign operative Mike Flynn. He tried to pressure then Attorney General Sessions to "un-recuse" himself in order to fire Mueller.

            Some of the other lies and acts of obstruction Trump engaged in (detailed in Mueller's report) include lying about the dirty-tricks Trump Tower meeting in order to conceal the fact that it was about getting dirt about the Clinton campaign. Also lying about the reason he fired Comey, including the whopper that he was ditching Comey because his reversals on the email issue during the campaign were widely regarded as unfair to Hillary! As if the Pretender would ever waste crocodile tears over that.

            Further (according to Mueller) Trump pressured a national security adviser to lie to the Washington Post about the contact between the felonious Flynn and the Russian ambassador. His director of national intelligence did lie to the Mueller investigation and to Congress about what Trump asked him to do. And serial liar Sarah Sanders wins her place in the Roll of Infamy by telling the whopper that FBI agents offered Rump a "way to go" backslap for firing their boss.

            Commentators in national newspapers such as The Washington and The New York Times pointed out that the Pretender's attempts to obstruct the investigation failed only because various aides, notably McGahn, refused to go along since they did not wish to be guilty of breaking the law themselves.

            So, the question remains, if these many attempts to obstruct a criminal investigation into possible violations of election law and other crimes are so clearly documented in the Mueller report, why didn't Muller charge the President of the United States with committing crimes?

            Here's the Mueller report's own answer. The report's authors state they chose “not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” -- that is, seek a criminal indictment -- "because of the Department of Justice regulations forbidding an indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting president."

            Trumpets for Trump! 

            Enter the Watergate connection. (What fine company our current administration is keeping.) Forty-plus years ago Watergate commission investigators asked the same sort of question that Mueller's team was forced to consider. If you have evidence that a President has broken a law, what do you do? The conclusion drawn then was that too many strains would be placed on a Constitutional system based on "The Separation of Branches and Powers" if a President's enemies were permitted to charge him with a crime and haul him into court. In Nixon's era the Department of Justice termed that possibility "unthinkable." 

              How can a President do his job -- a big job in a dangerous world -- they asked, if he was sitting in a dock in Alabama or a Alaska and trying to defend himself against a charge such as lying to Congress about whether -- just to imagine a wildly improbable scenario -- he ever "had sex with that woman"?  

            More seriously, the Department of Justice considered, imagine that the Russians were getting up to something -- back then, the White House considered them dangerous enemies. Would you want the President trying to deal with war or peace decisions with a criminal trial going on?

            The result is that ever since Watergate, the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel has maintained a policy on its books that "a sitting President" cannot be asked to face a criminal charge.

            The question of the sitting President's immunity is not intended to place him "above the law," the experts say, but to protect our system of government from politically motivated charges of wrongdoing that would hinder him in exercising powers that the Constitution has given solely to him -- such as acting as Commander in Chief. 

             The policy says nothing about whether the person serving as President could be made to face those charges once he steps down from office.

            The central point -- the sitting President's immunity from criminal prosecution -- can still be argued. Some legal minds contend there are other ways to shield him from partisan manipulation of the court system without giving him a complete pass, and legal scholars have debated it since Watergate.

            But for the moment, the Mueller report concluded, correctly in accord with federal law and precedent, that charging the President -- as a prosecutor would ordinarily charge anyyone else -- was simply not something within its power to do.

            It's unclear to me how widely the general public has grasped that point.

            But it's hard to see how anyone would fail to see that the claim that the report "exonerated" Trump from committing the crime of obstruction  -- as the current scoundrel in the attorney general's office has wrongly claimed -- is simply a bold-faced lie.

            What the Mueller report does say is this: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.”

            But the report did not so state. You have to be blind -- or a paid liar like the Pretender's fake attorney general -- to miss that.

            Michael Cohen, in his Globe piece, sums up the report's conclusion this way:

"Mueller seems to be taking the view that (a) it’s not his place to pass judgment on whether the president engaged in criminal wrongdoing, (b) it’s up to Congress to make that determination, and (c) the evidence his team assembled suggests that the president did in fact obstruct justice."

            Many commentators have since described the evidence assembled by the Mueller Commission as "a road map" for Congress to begin the impeachment process... if that's what Congress chooses to do.

            The bottom line is this. In order to protect the President from specious, partisan-driven criminal charges -- that could quite possibly keep him from performing his Constitutional duties and therefore screw up the correct functioning of our political system --

            (leaving aside, for the moment, the very real question of whether our political system is not already wholly screwed up and seriously dysfunctional for other, very serious reasons )

            -- the only court in the land that can hold a President responsible for criminal misbehavior is the United States Congress. That's what Impeachment is. Impeachment is not the same thing as Conviction. The best synonym for "impeachment" is the common enough word "trial."

            Congress put Nixon on trial, for very good reasons. In the '90s Congress put Bill Clinton on trial for very stupid reasons in a blatantly partisan attempt to weaken his political party. Although a conviction was not won, that gambit may have paid off at the polls when a weak Republican candidate (W), who knew little about the functioning of the federal government and paid his job as little attention as possible, subsequently defeated a much more experienced and prepared Democratic candidate, who was perhaps less successful in his imitation of a frat boy (Gore).

            Back in the 70s, Congress would have convicted Nixon, but that particular 'crook' resigned first. Back in the years after the Civil War, Congress impeached Andrew Johnson in an earlier partisan quarrel, but failed to convict him by a single vote. Congress failed to convict Clinton (as mentioned), but the attempt to manipulate the system arguably weakened the functioning of our system of government. It turns out that our 'political system' is based not only on what is stated in the Constitution, and its interpretation to meet present needs, but on high standards of ethical conduct by those who are elected, or appointed, to office.

            Federal officials swear to put the interests of the country before their personal and party interests. But, increasingly, they don't. This is obvious to all. And the more frequently, habitually, office holders lie, cheat, and sell their votes to the super-rich corporations, the more likely they make it that our government will be led by fatuous baboons such as the present fake-President.

            Somebody has to say that the country comes first. That the public interest comes first. That the welfare of Americans is more important than the career, wealth or egos of its so-called "public servants."

            And somebody has to stand up for the integrity of the American system of government. When it comes to criminal wrongdoing by the President of the Unites States, even a faker like the current fool on the hill, the only body that can do that job is Congress.

            Congress has to impeach -- even if a conviction may not be won -- to show that some branch of government is still trying to make the system work.