I believe it’s a well established legal theory that a President can not be charged with obstruction for exercising his Constitutional duties.
For example a President can issue pardons. Even for crimes which have not yet been charged or tried. This clearly “obstructs justice” and yet is also very clearly not obstruction of justice in a legal sense.
I am skeptical about any claim the investigation simply failed to find evidence that was there to be found, if not for obstruction by Trump. This was a very expensive, very long, very comprehensive investigation. My understanding is that Trump waives executive privilege and have quite unprecedented levels of access to his cabinet, staff, and even White House counsel.
The report very clearly states that their investigative efforts were stymied by lies from witnesses, and deleted evidence. If you combine this with the President's behavior and the rest of the report, it requires a larger assumptive leap to say that they did not coordinate with Russia to influence the 2016 US elections.
The leap is on persisting to assume that they did, when the special counsel had access to FISA warrants, NSA wiretaps, electronic eavesdropping, interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and generally investigated the hell out of this for hundreds of days, and in the end could not conclude that there was any cooperation or coordination with Russia.
In short, the full force of the USG investigated and came up short. I think the conspiracy is laid bare.
If you expected the report to conclude that the President/Campaign did not coordinate with Russia I’m sorry that was never going to happen. Because you cannot prove a negative.
You will always read a statement to this effect;
> Accordingly, while this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible, given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.“
Because you can always keep trying to investigate a little longer. Interview and re-interview another hundred witnesses. Review another million emails. Listen to about hundred thousand hours of intercepts.
But if there’s one thing we can say and everyone will agree, this investigation was comprehensive. It was extensive. It was extremely professional (plus or minus somewhat gestapo raid tactics).
But at this point the only thing to be said about claims that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the election, is that they are truly without evidence.
I'm not saying that we necessarily didn't find evidence because Trump obstructed the investigation. Maybe he was innocent of collusion and obstructed to prevent us from finding out about other crimes or embarrassing things. Maybe he had other reasons.
The point is that we don't know what we weren't able to learn because of his obstruction. Maybe it was just an unsuccessful attempt to cover up the things we did learn about. Those were certainly bad enough, but trying to cover them up could have prevented us from getting enough information to determine that his campaign wasn't colluding with Russia.
The strongest case that Mueller’s team could find to establish a charge of obstruction was Trump’s conversation with Comey where Comey said that Trump told him, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”
You can argue if that is obstruction or not, but I don’t see how it impedes the investigation to hope someone is not charged with a process crime.
For example a President can issue pardons. Even for crimes which have not yet been charged or tried. This clearly “obstructs justice” and yet is also very clearly not obstruction of justice in a legal sense.
I am skeptical about any claim the investigation simply failed to find evidence that was there to be found, if not for obstruction by Trump. This was a very expensive, very long, very comprehensive investigation. My understanding is that Trump waives executive privilege and have quite unprecedented levels of access to his cabinet, staff, and even White House counsel.