Again, it's quite clear at the end: "we did not reach a determination as to whether..."
Note what I wrote: "They declined to decide to prosecute". That option was never available to them. They did, however, strongly suggest that other mechanisms are available, just not to them.
As you say, picking and choosing doesn't work. You're blind and deaf to anything you don't want to hear so you conveniently ignore a large part of the hearing, the report, and the report's conclusions. The facts of the matter don't agree with you and the Republicans, though, and that won't change just because you cherry-pick among them.
Nope. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The truth is that there was not much there for him to work with. His animus towards the President was no worse than many on both sides of the political divide. Trump was too crass, too tacky, too boorish, too unrefined, too rude, too inexperienced and too full of himself and had to be taken out. Mueller was the insurance policy.
Mueller was always going to find some amount of dirt and unquestionable behaviour from some parties. Perjury traps are pretty easy because human memory and recall is flawed, and people when they are tired and stressed are prone to say things that are flawed. Investigating Lobbyists in politics by virtue of the activity and the types of people you find in those fields you will get dirt on them. Mannafort's political opposite is Tony Podesta, he is just as dirty and if HE were investigated for Russian contacts and the like would have found just as many and just as many unethical instances of poor conduct. Lobbyists are scummy. BUT they DO have connections and they are well versed in schmoozing and this is why Mannafort was taken on board. Not for his Russia connections.
All of this would be known. There was no there there.
The President was harassed over something he did not do based around a phony dossier that his political opponent hired through their law firm to get Fusion GPS to employ Christopher Steele to make up fake stories generated through Russian agents propaganda and inject they through Nelly Ohr of Fusion GPS investigator to DOJ management level Bruce Ohr, her husband, to DOJ, CIA and FBI.
Now given that this ALL was complete BS, and he knew it AND he knew it was both poisoning his campaign and Presidency and unfairly smearing him, where does the line between him rightly and righteously defending himself and rejecting the validity of the attempts to hurt his Presidency AND obstructing justice?
See here is where it all comes apart.
I know you want to think that a court of law will look at ONLY the negative and most detrimental aspects to his conduct and judge it devoid of any context of facts BUT that is not reality. They will need to look at things in context.
Were the charges based around solid intel and was it verified? Was he set up? Was it fruit from the poison tree?
He wanted to do a lot of things.....but wouldn't anyone? So okay, the underlying crime was bullshit. So there is that.
So did Trump withhold any information? Apparently not. He gave more information to Mueller's team than was asked and even Mueller's team had to agree the 1400000 pages were NOT held back.
Did he give pardons or immunity? He could have and in fact not only is it in his power but there is a precedent of exactly this behaviour. (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair) But did he? No
Did he invoke Executive Privilege? No.
Did he fire Bob Mueller? No. (Let's not get into whether he wanted to or thought about it or railed against Mueller or anything else. Unless it ACTUALLY happened then it falls somewhere between mind-crime and a crime without an action to support it).
Did Bob Mueller continue his investigation to its conclusion? Yes.
Did Trump hate being put under what he knew to be a phony investigation and deride and rail and espouse his innocence and seek to get out from under the cloud of this years long smear campaign? Yes. Did he struggle and make some mistakes? Sure. Did he do anything that materially affected the investigation or were they ineffectual and despite his frustrated efforts, allowed Mueller to complete the investigation? No and yes Mueller was allowed to complete this.
There is nothing there.
