After a televised press conference in which Special Counsel Robert Mueller simply reminded viewers what was contained in his 448-page report, a growing number of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are calling for impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.
On Wednesday morning, with the weary look of a professor at the end of a particularly trying school year, the special counsel presented a SparkNotes version of his two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by the president. Mueller said that if his office “had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” (As the report shows, they did not say so. Mueller helpfully noted that “the introduction to volume two of our report explains that decision.”) He reiterated the key Justice Department policy when investigating the executive branch: “Charging the president with a crime was … not an option we could consider.”
Read: Mueller breaks his silence—without breaking protocol
Even in redacted form, these conclusions were laid out clearly more than a month ago in a Times New Roman–esque font with two spaces after each sentence. Yet when read aloud by the man who led the historic probe, they evidently sounded much more alarming to lawmakers. Just minutes after Mueller concluded his remarks, a line of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates emerged as though from a clown car to call for Congress to weigh in on the topic of impeachment.