Pedgerow wrote:There was another post just as I was writing mine! Coincidental! But I still have a question:
Crimson847 wrote:Mueller has turned in his report, recommending no further indictments.
Forgive my impertinence, but doesn't this mean Donald Trump is innocent? Or was he never going to be indicted because an indictment is something else? That sounds to me like the official conclusion is, "Don't arrest Donald Trump; he has done nothing wrong", but my knowledge of the US legal system is limited almost entirely to things I've seen on TV.
That's how lots of folks have interpreted the news, and it
is pretty devastating for the MSNBC-type folks who've spent the last two years crowing that Mueller was mere days away from frog-marching the whole Trump family and half his administration out of the White House in handcuffs for treason against the United States.
Pictured: the next hot item at your local Goodwill donation center.
However, Department of Justice guidelines (which Mueller is subject to) dictate that a sitting president cannot be indicted for a crime; they must be removed by Congress or otherwise leave office first. Why? This gets into a somewhat arcane legal debate, but the theory is that because the DOJ's power is derived from the president's Constitutional authority, it's borrowed power that can't be used against the president. So the fact that Mueller isn't recommending an indictment of Trump doesn't necessarily tell us anything about Trump's guilt or innocence, because according to the standing guidelines Trump
can't be indicted. All Mueller can do about Trump himself is report his findings to Congress and let them bicker over what to do about it.
Another point worth noting is that Mueller farmed out investigations unrelated to Russian collusion to the FBI, which is why some of the "they're all getting marched out in handcuffs any minute" folks are now transferring their hopes to SDNY (Southern District of New York, the FBI office handling said
investigations).
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn