WASHINGTON _ The long-awaited Robert Mueller report on Russian election meddling and other Donald Trump inquiries has hit the nation's capital like a tsunami. The administration has responded with a public relations strategy worthy of a slick Madison Avenue spin factory.
The 448-page chronicle of President Trump's political indiscretions has hit the news media, both conservative and liberal, like a paper avalanche. Journalism's foot soldiers are tasked with sorting through the immense report in quest of Trump's vindication or guilt.
With the release of the report delayed for many weeks, the news media in all their ideological shadings are now obliged to examine on the fly the work and analysis of nearly two years' investigative labors, to explain it all to a deeply divided public.
Attorney General William Barr, Trump's handpicked defense lawyer, has craftily orchestrated a massive and complicated document and testimony dump that has overwhelmed and initially stymied the American press. Scheduling a news conference before the release of the report denied reporters the opportunity to question Barr deeply on its contents. They were left with separating wheat from chaff to inform voters of the battle on which the presidency of Donald Trump may well stand or fall.
In the hands of Barr, a second-time head of the Department of Justice who in effect applied for the job of Trump defender, the Mueller report has already declared the president innocent of alleged collusion in the Russian attack on our elections system.
But the jury is still out on whether Trump obstructed justice by pressing his former FBI director, James Comey, to give former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn a pass on lying to Vice President Mike Pence about a meeting with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Barr's release and bare-bones review of the Mueller report nakedly punted to Congress on obstruction. He said that while he could not find there was any, he along with Mueller could not exonerate Trump either. Their decision was to let the legislators, who via the Constitution hold the sole power of presidential impeachment, determine the outcome.
This act of firm indecision would seem to be a dereliction of duty by a high-level pair of legal beagles. The Mueller report itself is laden with dodges and buck-passing on what could be the end game for the Trump era. The president, in one of his own alleged comments, is reported to have moaned profanely at one point that the furor marked an early end of his presidency.
The report acknowledges that "the evidence we obtained about the President's activities and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment."
Hanging over this unsatisfactory non-decision is the fact Trump succeeded in stonewalling in-person testimony before Mueller under oath and under penalty of perjury _ a self-delivered get-out-of-jail-free card if ever there was one.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, counsels her flock against concentrating on impeachment of Trump, in favor of winning the 2020 election by selling the positive Democratic Party agenda, whether it be progressive or moderately liberal.
For all the talk of handing over impeachment to the House to initiate the process, if that happened, the Senate in Republican hands then would have to produce a two-thirds majority to convict Trump and remove him from the Oval Office. That outcome would seem unlikely right now.
So the fate of the Trump presidency may be in the hands of the voters again in November 2020, if they so decide then to show him the exit, or give the country four more years of the current chaos and anti-democratic rule.
