Trump Can Take a Victory Lap, But It’s a Partial One

President Donald Trump scored a significant political and legal victory on Sunday.

Attorney General William Barr, in a brief summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 presidential election, said that Mueller has determined that Trump and his aides didn’t conspire or coordinate with Russia in that country’s efforts to sabotage the campaign. Barr also said that Mueller hadn’t concluded whether or not Trump obstructed justice, but that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein determined that the Justice Department wouldn’t file obstruction charges against Trump. He pointed out that both men arrived at that decision apart from special “constitutional considerations” that would have been involved in trying to indict a sitting president.

Barr’s summary is outlined in a succinct four-page letter he sent to Congress late Sunday afternoon. Although the letter surely gives the president and his team reasons to celebrate, Barr also noted that Mueller hadn’t completely absolved them of wrongdoing. “While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” Barr said, quoting language from Mueller’s report.

Trump, jubilant, took to Twitter on Sunday evening to celebrate. But afforded the opportunity to take a victory lap, he still couldn’t avoid misrepresenting what the Mueller report actually said. “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!” he tweeted.

Barr also observed that the president may have acted to obstruct justice, but to convict him of obstruction “the government would need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person, acting with corrupt intent, engaged in obstructive conduct.” In other words, Barr and Rosenstein didn’t believe that they could prove, in an airtight fashion, that Trump intended to obstruct justice when, for example possibly, he fired his former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, in early 2017. (The fact that Rosenstein himself drafted a memo for Trump that the president used to justify his firing of Comey surely complicates how he might have assessed that event when reviewing the Mueller report.)

The letter would also suggest — though it doesn’t list any examples of some of the more well-known episodes that surfaced before and during Mueller’s probe — that, for example, meetings in Trump Tower in 2016 involving Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a group of Russians offering compromising information about Hillary Clinton did not amount to a conspiracy. What Mueller made of the president’s apparent efforts to obfuscate about that meeting — or his dissembling about his company’s efforts to engineer a business deal in Moscow during his presidential bid — will have to wait for further disclosures from the report.

Barr said he intends to “release as much of the Special Counsel’s report as I can consistent with applicable law, regulations and Departmental policies.” How much of the report Barr will make public is already an issue — and perhaps the source of coming political and legal conflicts — with Democrats in Congress demanding that it be released in its entirety.