Ted Lieu: “You did not indict Donald Trump is because of the OLC opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?”
MUELLER: “That is correct.”
Going to be posting this exchange endlessly in the coming months.
Trump is going to be indicted the moment he leaves office. And not just by the Feds, but by several states. He can’t even hope to resign and get Pence to pardon him, because Pence can’t possibly know all of the charges and pardon him for them and he can’t pardon Trump for state crimes.
Plus the fact that Pence would never win the 2020 election and would likely be primaried heavily.
A clarification from Mueller on the response to Leiu, sort of:
“Now before we go to questions, I want to go back to one thing that was said this morning by Mr. Lieu, who said, and I quote, ‘You didn’t charge the president because of the OLC opinion.’ That is not the correct way to say it. As we say in the report, and as I said at the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime. With that, Mr. Chairman, I’m ready to answer questions.”
So it was still about the OLC opinion, but if I’m reading it right he’s saying that due to the OLC opinion, they were not able to reach a determineation as to whether the President committed a crime.
He didn’t say he wasn’t able to, just that he did not. He also doesn’t explain why he did not and he did not state that it was because of the OLC opinion.
IOW he stands by the report. It was either a Freudian slip, an intentional nugget left there for anti-Trumpers, or an honest mistake.
Personally, I think that Schiff’s final set of questions were the most important to the whole thing and what most needs to be heard. They’re also ones that Mueller answered.
Regrettably, I expect the Democrats and the media to drop that ball on that.
Not to put too fine a point on it but… Mueller could very well be interpreting that in the broader sense. That is, no President can be indicted while in office, but any President may be indicted as soon as he leaves. IIRC, he made that very clarification.