The final report by the special counsel Robert Mueller is devastating for the president. Far from the “total and complete exoneration” that President Trump prematurely claimed when Attorney General William Barr released his four-page summary of Mr. Mueller’s work, the special counsel’s report, over the course of 400-plus pages, lays out a compelling case — even absent a prosecutive conclusion — of obstruction of justice by the president.

The report makes clear that the president’s obstruction of the F.B.I. and special counsel investigations crossed constitutional boundaries that could have merited criminal prosecution, if not for the Justice Department’s policy against indicting sitting presidents. Mr. Mueller’s report notes that his office explicitly considered absolving the president of obstruction of justice, but emphatically chose not to.

Instead, Mr. Mueller laid out 181 pages detailing the substantial evidence that Mr. Trump obstructed justice. His team also concluded that even if legal constraints prevented them from seeking to indict a sitting president for obstruction of justice, “Congress has authority to prohibit a president’s corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice.”

Far from ending the matter, the Mueller report is an unmistakable act of deference to Congress’s primary jurisdiction over accountability for the president. The House Judiciary Committee must now pick up where Mr. Mueller left off and begin holding proceedings to determine whether Mr. Trump abused the powers of his office.

The report details egregious evidence of obstruction, emphasizing the pattern of conduct that the president took after James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, confirmed the bureau’s investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Much of the most alarming conduct is well known: The president pressured officials, including Mr. Comey, to clear him publicly; he fired Mr. Comey because of his unwillingness to publicly state that the president was not under investigation, possibly to protect himself from an investigation into his campaign; he engaged in efforts to curtail the special counsel investigation, including by having his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski deliver a demand to Attorney General Jeff Sessions that he, too, publicly clear Mr. Trump and curtail the scope of the Russia investigation; he directed aides to withhold emails and drafted a misleading public statement for his son Donald Trump Jr. about the June 2016 meeting with several Russians at Trump Tower; he ordered the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to deny that he tried to fire the special counsel; and through his lawyers he appears to have floated the possibility of pardons for Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Cohen, three Trump associates who were charged by the special counsel.

Mr. Mueller also corroborates Mr. Comey’s accounts of two interactions with Mr. Trump, including the infamous Oval Office meeting where Mr. Trump asked him to “let Flynn go.” He emphasizes that the “way in which the president communicated the request to Comey” is critical in understanding Mr. Trump’s potentially corrupt intent. As the report emphasizes, “it is important to view the president’s pattern of conduct as a whole” — including the ways in which the president “used his unique ability” to influence others by attacking the investigation or potential witnesses via mass communications.

Crucially, the report explicitly rejects many of the most prominent defenses of the president that have been articulated by the president’s lawyers and Attorney General Barr.

First, the special counsel rejects the notion that the Constitution forecloses scrutiny of a president’s use of his own constitutional powers to impede investigations. Instead, it says, “the conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the president’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

Second, obstruction of justice cases do not require that the most prominent underlying crime being investigated — in this case conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia — be proven. To the contrary, the report states that “obstruction of justice can be motivated by a desire to protect noncriminal personal interests, to protect against investigations where underlying criminal conduct falls into a gray area, or to avoid personal embarrassment.” As the report repeatedly details, the motivation behind Mr. Trump’s obstructive conduct seems most likely to have fallen into one of these categories.

Indeed, someone seeking to obstruct justice may be looking to avoid detection of conduct he knows to be wrong, whether or not prosecutors ultimately conclude there was a criminal violation — which may explain the revelation that the president reacted to Mr. Mueller’s appointment with an expletive and the statement “this is the end of my presidency.”

And while the report also details some exculpatory considerations, including the fact that the president, in his campaign, did not engage in an explicit or implicit conspiracy with the Russian government, the document paints a picture of a president who repeatedly tried to impede an investigation that he knew would be damaging to him, his family and his associates.

Although Mr. Mueller operated under different rules from Leon Jaworski, who investigated President Richard Nixon, and Kenneth Starr, who investigated President Bill Clinton, he ultimately reached the same judgment as they did: that Congress, a body composed of elected representatives, is better placed than a prosecutor to determine whether to initiate proceedings that could result in an official’s removal from office.

Congress is also well equipped to make determinations that the special counsel decided were beyond his purview. Because Congress has the power only to remove, not indict, a president, it does not need to worry, as the special counsel appeared to in the context of a potential criminal prosecution, that its actions will hamper the ability of a president to continue serving as a chief executive. If Congress votes to impeach and convict, it is ending, not hampering, a presidency.

Congress, a co-equal branch of government, is also well suited to consider whether exercise of a president’s constitutional powers — including firing or directing subordinates for the purpose of impeding an investigation — amounts to obstruction of justice under the Constitution. The fact that Mr. Mueller explicitly did not resolve whether the president engaged in criminal conduct only reinforces the need for Congress to consider whether Mr. Trump violated his constitutional obligations to the American people.

Perhaps most crucially, congressional hearings play a pivotal role in articulating the enduring values of our republic. The reason for Congress to hold hearings is not to reach a preordained result, but rather to answer in a public setting the question of whether the president’s conduct is acceptable. While such inquiries have been and should continue to be a rare occurrence, Congress and the American people have every right to insist that the individual who swears an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” has not abused his powers to protect himself or his associates from the reach of justice.

The fact that much of the evidence of Mr. Trump’s obstruction occurred in plain view of the American people neither diminishes the seriousness of that conduct nor the need for further inquiry. As the Mueller report states, “no principle of law excludes public acts from the scope of obstruction statutes,” and the same is true for violations of the president’s obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

Rather than being exculpatory, the brazen, public nature of the president’s apparent obstruction is one of the reasons it presents such a grave threat to our democratic values. The greatest risk at this moment in our history is not that Congress will pursue an investigation that the president and his allies will do their best to malign as partisan. It is that we will send a clear message to future would-be authoritarians that our institutions cannot withstand a naked assault on the proposition that no person is above the law.

Our nation’s founders saw fit to empower Congress with an extraordinary remedy to address extraordinary executive misconduct. Failing to take up the mantle of accountability at a moment where circumstances so clearly demand it would set an abhorrent precedent for our democracy. Mr. Mueller did his job. It is time for members of Congress to do theirs.

Noah Bookbinder is the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Source: Read Full Article