The lesson of Mueller: An innocent man's defense can look like a guilty man's obstruction: Opinion

Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia collusion and interference in the 2016 election has concluded, there are new questions about alleged obstruction.

Were President Trump's actions obstructive in nature? Or the justified protestations of an innocent man?

The following is an excerpt of an article by John Solomon in The Hill.

Thousands of interviews and hundreds of subpoenas later, special counsel Robert Mueller broke his two-year Wizard of Oz-like silence on Thursday in the form of a 448-page report that formally dropped the curtain on the bad political musical we’ve come to know as the Russian collusion scandal.

Let the record reflect that Mueller wasted little time debunking the feigned electoral love affair between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump that so many Democrats and their allies in the news media sang to life.

With little equivocation, the prosecutor declared that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election, including by hacking presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Democratic National Committee documents, but there was no evidence, none, that the president or his campaign — or any American, for that matter — engaged in the conspiracy. 

To The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and other media outlets that fanned the Russia collusion narrative — and to congressional Democrats such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) who insisted there was secret evidence to support it — I refer you to this declaration in Mueller’s report: 

“In sum, the investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russia government. Those links included Russian offers of assistance to the Campaign. In some instances the Campaign was receptive to the offers, while in other instances the Campaign officials shied away. Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated orconspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”

One inherent message of the first volume of the Mueller report is clear: It is time for the professional media to assume responsibility for its role in inflaming the public with a scandal that wasn’t proven, by endlessly quoting intelligence and partisan political sources whose claims went far beyond the evidence it slithered upon. (Continued)

You can read the rest of Solomon's article in The Hill here: The lesson of Mueller: An innocent man's defense can look like a guilty man's obstruction