Democrats' Relentless, Fruitless Hunt for the Great Orange Whale

Democrats are trying to spin the Mueller Report as welcome news. Good luck with that. Legally, they’ve got no case left. Politically, they are making a serious mistake.

They do have some material to work with, especially the report’s second volume, which portrays a vulgar, deceitful president. The details are new, but the portrait itself is not. What’s new are some cases where the president came close to obstructing justice, according to the special counsel’s investigators. Even so, they did not say he crossed the line.

The most important news, of course, is the report’s basic findings. It clearly demonstrates Russia tried to influence the 2016 election and favored Trump, but it kills the assertion that Trump or his campaign cooperated with them. For two years, Democrats and the mainstream media said the opposite about Trump — repeatedly, loudly, insistently. To continue that attack now is ludicrous. That doesn’t mean they will retract, apologize, or return their Pulitzer Prizes. They prefer to change the subject.

Their new focus is obstruction, where the evidence is more ambiguous. The Mueller team presents 10 possible instances and made no final decision. But that, in itself, is a decision since prosecutors must ultimately choose to indict or drop the matter. There is no third choice, and they didn’t indict. Significantly, their refusal was based on the evidence, not on the Department of Justice’s long-standing legal opinion that sitting presidents cannot be indicted.

Escaping criminal charges is not exactly high praise for a president. Still, the Mueller team’s refusal to indict carries special weight because the prosecution team was stacked with Democratic donors and close allies of Hillary Clinton. That provenance shows throughout the report, which reads like opposition research, equipped with subpoena powers.