Fox News legal analyst: Mueller basically said Trump would have been indicted if not president

Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano on Wednesday said special counsel Robert Mueller “basically” said in a public statement that his office would have indicted President Trump had he not been president.

“This is even stronger than the language in his report,” Napolitano said on Fox Business Network after Mueller delivered his first public comments on the 22-month investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether Trump obstructed justice.

{mosads}Napolitano added Mueller’s comments also seemed like a “parting shot at his soon-to-be former boss,” Attorney General William Barr.

“Because this statement is 180 degrees from the four-page statement that Bill Barr issued at the time he first saw the report,” Napolitano said.

Asked by Fox Business host Stuart Varney if it was that bad, Napolitano replied, “I think so.”

“Basically he’s saying the president can’t be indicted, otherwise we would have indicted him, and we’re not going to charge him with a crime because there’s no forum in which for him to refute the charges, but we could not say that he didn’t commit a crime — fill in the blank, because we believe he did,” he said.

He later went on to say that the press conference from Mueller was bad for Trump and Barr, but “fodder” for Democratic lawmakers. 

Mueller’s investigation did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that the 2016 Trump campaign and Moscow conspired to influence the most recent presidential election. But his investigate report said that Mueller did not come to a conclusive determination on whether Trump obstructed justice. 

Mueller said Wednesday that his office did not charge Trump with a crime because it “was not an option” under regulations from the Department of Justice about indicting a sitting president. He also said that “if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.”

The comments were delivered about two months after Barr sent a four-page memo to Congress regarding Mueller’s investigation. Barr wrote in the memo that Mueller did not establish that Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia.

Barr also said that Mueller did not reach a conclusion regarding obstruction, but that he judged the evidence against Trump to be insufficient.

Napolitano has repeatedly weighed in on matters related to the investigation since Mueller’s report was released. He said in April that the report contained “at least a half-dozen” instances of Trump committing obstruction of justice.