Mueller, Trump gave contrasting performances in a two-year drama
Special counsel Robert Mueller at the Justice Department in Washington on Wednesday. Credit: Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla
An unfamiliar voice suddenly streamed out of Robert Mueller's much-photographed face on Wednesday. For nine and a half minutes, the public got to hear, in a soft clipped tone, sentences that were palpably founded in fact.
The brief sermon-free remarks from America's outgoing investigator of Russian election mischief contrasted with President Donald Trump's false rants of how Mueller's probe amounted to a sinister partisan cabal against him.
All Mueller really had to share came out last month in his office's 408-page report. Before the cameras, he attacked nobody. In an atmosphere of constant Washington spin, he spun nothing. He said: "If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so."
"We did not make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime," he added, because "under long-standing department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional."
The fact that Mueller showed discipline, and removed himself from the spotlight without taking questions, sent a message to those who wished to hear it that the government in some ways still functions within the rules despite polarizing noise from the top.
What lies ahead for the Congress and Attorney General William Barr? That's no longer Mueller's problem, as he made clear.
The Trump camp and its detractors now battle over how to analyze the special counsel's newly audible words. One side discusses how Mueller "declined to clear" the president. Trump's side says Mueller didn't dispute Barr's controversial summary of the report to Congress.
What matters more is that the difference in role and profile between Trump and Mueller was always clear. The 12-year FBI director and highly decorated Marine Corps commander not only served in Vietnam but has been a Republican longer than Trump.
Trump's lawyer-spokesman Rudy Giuliani attempted a contrived shot at Mueller after the address: "To me as a lawyer it’s astounding that he’s expounding on can we exonerate or can’t we exonerate."
But it sounds like the ex-mayor was trying to do the expounding. The president advertised the lack of charges against him as a "complete and total exoneration.” In fact, as Mueller and his professional staff wrote in their carefully-worded text: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
In other words, the president's repeated incantation of "no collusion, no obstruction" cannot be attributed to the man who investigated the Trump campaign and the president's clumsy and failed attempts to derail that probe. Mueller, meanwhile, walks on solid ground as he departs.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
