Dana Mathewson

I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV or anywhere else. But I must admit I am happy when a real one, such as Andrew McCarthy, clarifies things that, well, need clarifying, as he does here.

Since Attorney General William Barr released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, and even before -- when he gave his press conference prior to doing so, he released some information that may have been a bit confusing to those of us who lack a legal education. And it sure exploded a number of heads of Congressional Democrats, though as we know, it doesn't take a lot to make THAT happen. I'm referring to his reference to possible acts of obstruction of justice.

Here, the great Andrew McCarthy clarifies things.

The most interesting new disclosure to come out of Attorney General William Barr’s press conference on the Mueller report was about obstruction of justice.

As I pointed out in a Fox News column this morning, the obstruction issue was one of the main reasons why the media-Democrat complex’s caterwauling about Barr’s unremarkable decision to hold a press conference was ludicrous. Special Counsel Mueller declined to render a prosecutorial judgment on whether obstruction charges should be brought against the president. Since it is the attorney general who made the judgment, for that reason alone it was worth hearing from him this morning.

The attorney general stated that the special counsel evaluated ten incidents with an eye toward whether they amounted to an obstruction offense. Barr elaborated that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disagreed with Mueller on whether these incidents even could have amounted to obstruction as a matter of law.

It is important to grasp what that means, and what it doesn’t, because I’ve heard some inaccurate commentary. Barr was not saying that Mueller found one or more of these incidents to constitute obstruction; Mueller was saying that the incidents involved actions that could theoretically have amounted to obstruction.

A concrete example may make this easier to grasp: the firing of FBI director James Comey. Before a prosecutor considered evidence regarding that incident, there would be a preliminary question: Could the president’s dismissal of an FBI director amount to an obstruction offense as a matter of law? If prosecutors were to decide that, even if the evidence showed corrupt intent on the part of the president, a president’s firing of the FBI director cannot constitutionally amount to an obstruction crime, then the prosecutors would not bother to investigate and make an assessment of the evidence.

What Barr is saying is that he and Mueller did not agree, with respect to all ten incidents, on whether the incident could legally amount to obstruction. What the attorney general therefore did was assume, for argument’s sake, that Mueller was correct on the law (i.e., that the incident could theoretically amount to obstruction), and then move on to the second phase of the analysis: Assuming this could be an obstruction offense as a matter of law, could we prove obstruction as a matter of fact? This requires an assessment of whether the evidence of each element of an obstruction offense – most significantly, corrupt intent – could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

It's a two-step process, in other words. First, could the act be a matter of obstruction of justice in the first place? If not, go on to the next one. If it could, only then should it be analyzed to determine if, in this case, it actually WAS an obstruction of justice. And as we'll see in the article found here, https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/william-barr-press-conference-no-obstruction-on-the-facts-of-the-case/  in none of the ten cases was it actually an obstruction of justice.

But of course those loathsome creatures Schiff and Nadler won't accept that. They'll continue to insist that in this pile of stinking dung there just HAS to be a pony somewhere.

And so they'll insist on seeing an unredacted version of the report, even though that's against the law. And if somehow one of their subcommittees gets their hands on such a copy, you can bet your boots there'll be leaks, and information that should never be made public WILL be made public.

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