Mueller

Federal-level justice and law enforcement make for some enigmatic characters. There was J. Edgar Hoover, who was a strange person brought with peculiar obsessions. More recently, we've had Attorneys General such as Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, on whose watches Fast and Furious and the Bill Clinton tarmac conversation occurred.

But some of these figures are hard to read. Those who have recently been embroiled in controversy, such as James Comey and Rod Rosenstein are not overtly ideological the way, say, Holder was. It's hard to read what drives them at their cores, given the bearing they show to the world.

How about Robert Mueller? A former FBI director with distinguished military service among his accomplishments. He's spoken of favorably by a number of seasoned colleagues.

But what he said yesterday kind of puts the cap on what had been suspected about the entire way he'd carried out his two-year investigation.

He turned a basic premise of American understanding of the relationship between the individual citizen and the law on its head.

As Alan Dershowitz puts it:

No responsible prosecutor should ever suggest that the subject of his investigation might indeed be guilty even if there was insufficient evidence or other reasons not to indict. 

As Greg Jarrett, legal analyst at Fox News, puts it:

 He set forth in luxurious detail “evidence on both sides of the question.” But this is not the job of any chief prosecutor, anywhere.

Mueller was not retained to compose a masterpiece worthy of Proust. He was hired to investigate potential crimes arising from Russian interference in a presidential election and make a reasoned decision on whether charges were merited. 

As Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review puts it:

 That’s not how it works in America. Investigators are supposed to look for evidence that a crime was committed, and, if they don’t find enough to contend that a crime was a committed, they are supposed to say “We didn’t find enough to contend that a crime was committed.” They are notsupposed to look for evidence that a crime was not committed and then say, “We couldn’t find evidence of innocence.”

I understand that the main conversational point going forward is going to be whether this sufficiently emboldens Democrats to pursue impeachment, but I'd like to know how we can get a closer bead on what motivates this guy.

Seriously, what compels him to put it that way?

I understand that some are absolutely certain that the answer is that Mueller had the long knives out for Trump from the get-go, but he just hasn't given that indication.

I think. As I say, he's one of those enigmatic types.