Former campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign John Podesta said Thursday that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “lays out a devastating case” against President Donald Trump.
In an opinion-editorial for the Washington Post, Podesta wrote the Mueller report stated that the Trump campaign was aware of a WikiLeaks document dump of emails that Russian intelligence associates stole from Clinton’s campaign and the Democrat National Committee’s (DNC) servers.
The longtime Clintonista wrote:
Mueller lays out a devastating case against the president, but explicitly says in the introduction to the obstruction section that given the Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president, it would be unfair to draw the conclusion that seems obvious from the facts that follow, because Trump wouldn’t be able to defend himself in a court of law.
“Mueller got us this far. Now it’s Congress’s turn to weigh the evidence against the president, decide what merits a response and act in the best interests of our democracy,” he went on.
The Justice Department on Thursday released the long-awaited report from special counsel Robert Mueller, with redactions, which specifies the two-year Russia investigation and details how the team found no evidence of collusion involving the Trump campaign before the 2016 election.
The report, 448 pages in length, describes in detail how the Russian GRU intelligence unit hacked the Clinton campaign’s emails, which were subsequently leaked by WikiLeaks.
The report states:
The investigation … identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency … the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election activities.
Mueller’s report echoes the summary given last month by Attorney General William Barr, saying there was insufficient evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia. One question that has lingered for weeks regards the report’s details on potential obstruction of justice charges against President Donald Trump. Thursday’s release detailed ten episodes in which questions over such charges were weighed.
The investigation ultimately failed to find sufficient evidence that the episodes amounted to obstructing justice.
In response to the report Thursday, President Trump tweeted a graphic that read, “Game Over,” in a style from the HBO drama Game of Thrones.
