To be clear, it was Barr, not Mueller, who said that Mueller hadn’t found anything to charge him with, regardless of DOJ policy. Tell me if that matches Mueller’s opinion on the matter, verbatim from the statement he gave earlier this week:
“...we did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime. The introduction to volume two of our report explains that decision. It explains that under long-standing department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited. The special counsel's office is part of the Department of Justice and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider.
The department's written opinion explaining the policy makes several important points that further informed our handling of the obstruction investigation. Those points are summarized in our report and I will describe two of them for you.
First, the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could be charged now. And second, the opinion said that the constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing. And beyond department policy, we were guided by principles of fairness. It would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge. So that was justice department policy, those were the principles under which we operated and from them, we concluded we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime.”
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