White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s attorney husband George Conway, a noted Trump nemesis, capped off Just Security’s Mueller Report summary project on Tuesday with an epilogue nudging Congress to hold President Donald Trump to account.
The Mueller Report project, “Expert Summaries of Mueller Report: A Collection,” included summaries from legal analysts–many of whom you may recognize right away–on both Russian interference in the 2016 election and the obstruction of justice volume of Robert Mueller’s work. At the very end of all of these summaries was Conway’s commentary and his conclusion that the president “committed the crime of obstructing Justice—multiple times.”
Conway wrote that Trump “relentlessly attacked” the Mueller investigation for two years; “tried to sharply curtail it, and even kill it altogether”; “tried to fire the special counsel”; “directed his White House counsel to tell the acting attorney general that the special counsel could not serve because of a contrived, nonexistent conflict of interest, and thus had to go”; “tried to get the attorney general, who had recused himself from the investigation, to unrecuse himself, so that the attorney general could get rid of the special counsel”; “urged a political ally, a former campaign aide not in the government, to surreptitiously tell the attorney general that the investigation should be limited to future election interference only”; “brutally attacked the attorney general on Twitter, and in the press, for recusing himself”; “tried to affect the cooperation and testimony of witnesses.”
As most everyone knows by now, former special counsel Robert Mueller did not charge the president with a crime (he said that was never an option due to DOJ policy against indicting a sitting president). Mueller nonetheless took it upon himself to say the extraordinary: that Trump was not exonerated/”exculpated” (“If we had confidence that the president did not commit a crime, we would have said so).
Conway was abundantly clear about his thoughts on this. Conway wrote that Trump did “much more” than what was highlighted in the epilogue, before adding that “all of this is more than enough”:
He committed the crime of obstructing justice—multiple times. The report doesn’t specifically draw this conclusion, but it goes through the legal analysis step by step, and the result, at least for several of the incidents the report describes, is clear. Trump’s conduct satisfies the three essential elements of obstruction: (1) an obstructive act, meaning anything that could impede the course of justice; (2) a nexus, meaning a temporal, causal, or logical connection, to a pending or contemplated or official proceeding; and (3) corrupt intent.
In closing, Conway urged Congress to “hold the President to account” (Conway has called for Trump’s impeachment before).
“If the Mueller report demonstrates one thing, it is that President Trump utterly failed to carry out his duties under the Constitution—that indeed, he shamelessly abjured them,” Conway concluded. “It is time for members of Congress to do their duties and to hold the President to account.”
[Images via Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]
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