Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe came out swinging at former special counsel Robert Mueller, using his entire five minutes’ speaking time to attack Mueller for refusing to completely exonerate President Donald Trump for obstruction.
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Mueller largely stuck to the conclusions of his report, which stated that President Trump did not conspire with Russia to swing the 2016 US election. Democrats pressed Mueller on the second half of his report, which outlined ten instances of potential obstruction of justice, but which ultimately declined to make a prosecutorial decision.
To Texas Republican John Ratcliffe, Mueller had no legal basis to list potential crimes without bringing charges, and no right to say that Trump was not exonerated, as the former investigator told committee chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York) earlier.
“It’s not in special counsel regulations...it’s not in the principles of federal prosecution,” Ratcliffe said, “because, respectfully, it was not the special counsel’s job to conclusively determine Donald Trump’s innocence or exonerate him.”
“It clearly says ‘write a report about decisions reached.’ Nowhere in here does it say ‘write a report about decisions that weren’t reached,’” Ratcliffe thundered. “You wrote 180 pages about decisions that weren’t reached, about potential crimes that weren’t charged or decided!”
By doing so, Ratcliffe concluded “you managed to violate every principle and the most sacred of traditions about prosecutors not offering extra-prosecutorial analysis about potential crimes.”
In keeping with his reputation as a man of few words, Mueller remained mostly silent during Ratcliffe’s grilling.
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