Mueller Counted on Institutions to Grapple With His Report. They Didn’t.

On May 17, 2017, Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation. On May 29, 2019—a month after the release of his report on the investigation, and almost exactly two years after he was first appointed—Mueller finally spoke.

Based only on the reaction to Mueller’s appearance, you could be forgiven for assuming that he had dropped a bombshell. “Robert Mueller’s statement makes it clear: Congress has a legal and moral obligation to begin impeachment proceedings immediately,” the Democratic presidential hopeful Cory Booker. Booker’s fellow candidate Senator Kamala Harris had a . Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell , “Robert Mueller gave important context by saying ‘If we had confidence that the President did not commit a crime we would have said so.’” “This is huge,” the CNN national-security reporter Jim Sciutto. to Mueller’s comment that, on the basis of the Justice Department guidance against indicting a sitting president, “we concluded that we would not reach a determination … about whether the president committed a crime,” the statements definitively showed Attorney General