A New Beginning?
Apr 9, 2019
The Mueller Report was billed to be the single most fundamentally shocking piece of paper in recent American history. No, this is not an exaggeration. A report that was supposed to uncover the rigging of a presidential election by a foreign adversary and the current President himself is bone-chilling. But for many hoping to impeach President Trump for being an agent of the Russian government, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation came up short. Watergate and Starr were to be rivaled by Mueller; surpassed even. No such scandal engulfed the presidency this time; Donald Trump was not found to have actively colluded with the Russians to rig the 2016 election in his favor. This was certainly the biggest cloud hovering over President Trump throughout his first three years in office, constantly having to refer to the investigation as a witch hunt, firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions for doing the right thing and recusing himself from an investigation into events in which he had a part to play. Will this usher in a new, policy-driven final year for President Trump, or will the lack of complete exoneration shown in the report still loom over his head and force him to respond?
“I think the end of Mueller’s investigation should lay to rest many of the outlandish claims being made on both sides of the aisle regarding the nature of the investigation and its result,” senior Angelle Garcia.
It seems dismissive and narrow-minded to call Mueller’s investigation a failure. It resulted in numerous indictments against people in Trump’s campaign that clearly broke the law and had an undue influence on the election. The arrests of high-ranking officials in the government is enough to warrant the time and hysteria spent on following Robert Mueller’s every step. It suffices to say that those who broke the law from within our own government, and in an attempt to gain power, are being held accountable. But how does a society that was so invested in the result of this investigation move on when many deem it a failure, when many fail to see that the fact the President of the United States did not rig the election, or obstruct an investigation into the very same, is a good thing, rather than an unsavory political outcome?
It should be easy to separate fact from fiction in the case; Trump’s campaign staff was littered with criminals, but that does not make him complicit in their crimes. Robert Mueller did not find evidence of collusion by the President, and could not prove to a necessary standard that Trump was involved in any tampering with the investigation. That standard should be held by an entire society, not just ignored by those that do not see a full exoneration as a means to impose their own standard on the legal system, one rooted in political bias. The time has come to move on from an investigation that was faithfully executed by some of the most professional and competent lawyers in the country and accept the fact that there may not be a verdict in the “case” against President Trump, and no one is in a position to lay out their own verdict based on their own ideas. There is no need to fight Trump’s crusade against the investigation that he so proudly called a witch hunt with ideas that too closely match his description.