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Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2019 17:42:33 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Democrats in Washington <\/span>found themselves Friday confronting an unwelcome surprise conclusion following the release<\/a> of the final report by special counsel Robert Mueller<\/a>: Maybe we should impeach President Trump after all<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Ever since taking back the House of Representatives in January, Democratic leaders have carefully modulated the demands for impeachment from their activist base. First, they stressed the need to wait for the outcome of Mueller\u2019s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Last month, House speaker Nancy Pelosi splashed cold water<\/a> on the idea of impeachment, telling The Washington Post\u2019s<\/em> Joe Heim, \u201cImpeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there\u2019s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don\u2019t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he\u2019s just not worth it.\u201d<\/p>\n The idea that Democrats would focus on defeating Trump at the ballot box in 2020 had become accepted conventional wisdom in recent weeks, particularly after attorney general Bill Barr\u2019s late March summary<\/a> of Mueller\u2019s conclusions seemed to indicate that Mueller\u2019s findings had resulted in what Trump himself declared on Twitter as \u201cTotal EXONERATION<\/a>!\u201d<\/p>\n As Mueller sees it, Congress has a unique role in sorting through questions of presidential malfeasance.<\/p>\n Yet as the hours passed Thursday, and Washington digested the 448 pages submitted by Mueller\u2019s Special Counsel Office, a sense of surprise and almost dread descended on Democratic leaders: Mueller appeared to have delivered a report that was all but an explicit impeachment referral<\/a>, examining in lurid and compelling detail at least 10 specific instances where it appeared President Trump had sought to obstruct the special counsel\u2019s Russia investigation, through a mix of official actions, private badgering of witnesses, and public statements.<\/p>\n Moreover, contrary to what Barr had repeatedly suggested<\/a>\u2014including just an hour before the report\u2019s public release\u2014the report makes clear that Mueller\u2019s refusal to make a \u201ctraditional prosecutorial decision\u201d was explicitly guided by the fact that he believed the Justice Department could not indict the president while in office. Barr had seemed to indicate that Mueller had failed to find obstruction.<\/p>\n The report clearly says the opposite. Mueller found plenty of Trump actions that could be considered obstruction but felt that it was not his role to prosecute them. \u201cIf we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president did not obstruct justice, we would so state,\u201d Mueller\u2019s report says. \u201cBased on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the President\u2019s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.\u201d<\/p>\n The presidential obstruction was clear in its objective and utilized, corruptly, the office\u2019s own powers. If anything, Trump was stymied only by associates who refused to go along. \u201cOur investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,\u201d Mueller wrote. \u201cThe President\u2019s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That means, ultimately, the question remains unsettled. And as Mueller sees it, Congress has a unique role in sorting through questions of presidential malfeasance.<\/p>\n Pressure for Congress to act mounted almost by the hour.<\/p>\n That combo\u2014a more damning report than expected and an explicit mention of Congress\u2019s role\u2014reawakened questions of impeachment in ways not seen since a momentary kerfuffle<\/a> early in the year, when a BuzzFeed report<\/a> seemed to indicate Mueller would present evidence that Trump had \u201cdirected\u201d his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. (The Special Counsel\u2019s Office ended up issuing an unprecedented statement refuting that reporting, though later<\/a> testimony<\/a> by Cohen himself on Capitol Hill made clear the matter hinged on more subtle interpretations of Trump\u2019s conduct. As Cohen said, \u201cAt the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there\u2019s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing. In his way, he was telling me to lie.\u201d BuzzFeed, buoyed by some of Mueller\u2019s own reporting Thursday, issued an update<\/a> last night following the report\u2019s release.)<\/p>\n The second-highest ranking Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer, was first out of the gate Thursday to bat down any resurgence of impeachment proceedings: \u201cBased on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point,\u201d Hoyer told CNN<\/a>. \u201cVery frankly, there is an election in 18 months, and the American people will make a judgement.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet pressure for Congress to act mounted almost by the hour. \u201cIf this isn't obstruction of justice\u2014what is,\u201d said<\/a> legal scholar Jeffrey Toobin. Former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah wrote<\/a>, \u201cI read Mueller\u2019s decision on obstruction to be that there was a lot of evidence of obstruction and evidence of criminal intent (which Mueller indicated in his explanation for why he didn\u2019t pursue the interview with Trump), and that the final decision should go to Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n The Washington Post<\/em>'s editorial board declared<\/a> the report \u201cthe opposite of an exoneration.\u201d Writer Yoni Applebaum at The Atlantic<\/em>, which has called for<\/a> the president\u2019s impeachment even before Mueller\u2019s report, laid out clearly how Mueller intended<\/a> to refer the matter to Congress. \u201cMueller got us this far,\u201d wrote<\/a> John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chair in 2016, whose emails Russia hacked and leaked prior to the election. \u201cNow it\u2019s Congress\u2019s turn to weigh the evidence against the president, decide what merits a response and act in the best interests of our democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n Impeachment ultimately is a two-step process: First, the House would hold impeachment hearings, to decide on whether there\u2019s sufficient evidence for so-called \u201carticles of impeachment.\u201d If, after public hearings, those articles are voted out of the House, it would then fall to the Republican-controlled Senate to hold a trial, presided over by chief justice John Roberts. Two-thirds of the Senate would have to vote to convict the president for Trump to be removed.<\/p>\n House Judiciary chair Jerrold Nadler, whose committee would officially begin impeachment proceedings, began Friday by subpoenaing<\/a> the full Mueller report. Even if successful, it\u2019s unlikely to dramatically change the public\u2019s understanding of Trump and Russia\u2019s behavior. The report, particularly the second volume dealing with the question of obstruction, was lightly redacted, and many of the redactions appear related to ongoing criminal investigations that don\u2019t target the president personally. Congressional Democrats also called on Mueller to testify personally on the Hill, setting a deadline of late May for the special counsel to appear and answer his own questions about the report and findings.<\/p>\n The members of Nadler\u2019s committee, meanwhile, who had used \u201cLet\u2019s wait until Mueller is done\u201d as political cover for months, were left stumbling, insisting that even though Mueller was done\u2014and his findings damning\u2014they still needed more time. \u201cA systematic effort to obstruct justice would clearly be an impeachable offense. The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for obstructing justice over one lie,\u201d committee member Jamie Raskin told Politico<\/a>. \u201cBut I don\u2019t think we\u2019re there yet. We are still in the assembling-of-facts phase.\u201d<\/p>\n The political calculus around Trump and the Mueller report was complicated by two other figures instantly caught up in the report\u2019s revelations: attorney general Barr, who seemed to carefully mislead the country about Mueller\u2019s findings, and Richard Burr, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who according to a footnote<\/a> in Mueller\u2019s report had apparently funneled information from confidential FBI briefings to his committee back to the White House about who was being targeted by the probe.<\/p>\n If true, such activity would be a deep, fundamental abuse of the traditional classified \u201cGang of 8\u201d briefings on Capitol Hill, whereby the intelligence community and FBI share their most sensitive information with congressional leaders.<\/p>\n Both men, Burr and Barr, are likely to face hard questions ahead too. And regardless of the answers, Congressional Democrats have an even harder choice to make.<\/p>\n Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg<\/a>) is a contributing editor for WIRED and coauthor of Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat<\/a>. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n