After Mueller, What’s the Political Fallout?
Impeachment is now less likely. But the investigations will go on — as they should.
Over and out.
Photographer: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
We know more today than we did Friday about President Donald Trump’s actions during the 2016 campaign and its aftermath. Most of what we’ve learned — from Attorney General William Barr’s summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation — is good for the president and probably for the nation. As far as Mueller could determine, Trump and his associates didn’t mount a criminal conspiracy with Russia to undermine the election. That’s good news.
An absence of further indictments isn’t quite the full exoneration that the president is tweeting about, of course. But it’s not nothing. The most feverish conjectures — that perhaps Trump was an active traitor to his country or was being blackmailed by a foreign government — are almost surely flat-out wrong. We also know that Trump never ended up firing Mueller. That, too, counts in his favor, and is contrary to a lot of speculation (often, I’ll note, expressed as certainty).