David Frum: The wisest remedy is not impeachment

It didn’t. And it can’t. This is not, I must stress, because Mueller is a bad person. On the contrary: Mueller seems to be a man of integrity. Rather, it is because to ask the executive branch to investigate itself is to make demands of the American constitutional order that the American constitutional order cannot support.

There were only two possible outcomes here. The first of those outcomes was that President Donald Trump left Mueller’s investigation alone completely and did not retain even a cursory oversight role. This, clearly, was an approach that many hoped to see Trump take. I cannot count the number of times I heard it said that Mueller must be permitted to retain his “independence.” But for Trump to have done this would, in effect, to have been to create a de facto fourth branch of government that was ultimately accountable to nobody. The prosecution power is vested in the executive branch. Trump is the head of the executive branch. An investigation conducted without his superintendence would have been, by definition, illegitimate.

The other potential outcome—the one we got—was that Trump maintained the authority over his branch that the Constitution accords him, and was chastised for having done so. One does not need to believe that Trump’s conduct was irreproachable to grasp that the charges of “obstruction” on which we are all now focused were unavoidable by dint of the way the investigation was set up. Criminal obstruction, remember, hinges not on action but intent. Because he is the head of the executive branch, Trump enjoys a wide latitude to direct the Department of Justice. Determining whether he used that power for good or for ill is, ultimately, a matter of judgment—of mind reading, even. There is no detective in the world who can do that job. There is probably no detective who should.

Quinta Jurecic: Mueller counted on institutions to grapple with his report. They didn’t.

Advocates of the Mueller investigation maintain that, as president, Trump should have behaved in a more sober way, and thereby allayed fears that he was trying to cover something up. And, indeed, as a matter of political propriety, he should have done just that. But as the Founders understood, to predicate your political system on the demand that men with power “should behave better” is to set yourself up for failure. Experience has taught us that kings do not relinquish their authority to please the chattering classes, and that self-interest and ambition cannot be quelled by chastisement or persuasion. Only a rival power center can do that.

I am talking, of course, about Congress, which is supposed to be at the center of our federal politics, but which has in recent years rendered itself depressingly otiose. Congress, lest we forget, is far and away the most powerful of the three federal branches—so powerful, in fact, that it can remove pretty much every single person within the others for reasons of its own invention. Had it done its job and led the investigation into Trump, it would have likely avoided all the intractable problems that the Mueller investigation introduced.