During a recent extended stay in Italy, I tried to do my country proud. I didn’t parade around in shorts with a selfie stick. I tipped extravagantly in the restaurants of Florence.

And I read the Mueller Report.

I’m not sure where that engagement with the special counsel’s investigation currently ranks among our patriotic duties, but it’s the starting point for any discussion about Russian’s dramatic interference in the 2016 presidential election.

A serious conversation about Donald Trump’s efforts to obstruct Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation can not be filtered through Attorney General William Barr or your friends at Fox.

As Mueller said Wednesday, with characteristic reserve, about a potential appearance before Congress, “Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report. It contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we made. We chose those words carefully, and the work speaks for itself.”

Those 448 redacted pages spoke to me, and they’re calling to you.

Almost immediately, the report makes several things clear. Collusion was never at issue, no matter how often it appeared on Trump’s Twitter feed or was “invoked in public reporting about the investigation.”

And coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to interfere with the election “was never established.”

Offers were made. Meetings at Trump Tower were held. Invective from @TEN_GOP, a Russia-controlled Twitter account, was gleefully recycled by Donald Trump Jr. and Kellyanne Conway.

But over the course of two years, 2,800 subpoenas and five hundred search-and-seizure warrants, “Bob Mueller and his group of 18 killers” – as Trump calls them – never conclude that Republicans choreographed the social-media attacks directed at Hillary Clinton.

Obstruction? Obstruction is another issue altogether.

The evidence that Trump is a clear and ever-present danger to our democracy unfolds in the second half of Mueller’s report.

In plumbing for truth, the special counsel had to deal with false statements from among others, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen.

“After a year of discussion, the President declined to be interviewed,” Mueller notes, despite “numerous accommodations to aid the President’s preparation and avoid surprise.” The written answers that Trump eventually provides are so vague and vacuous as to be wholly “inadequate.”

Yet Mueller still lays out the compelling argument that Trump was so obsessed with the fear that the investigation would diminish him and his Electoral College victory that he pressured former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to interfere with it.

On June 17, 2017, Trump twice called McGahn at home, ordering him to call Rod Rosenstein and say “the special counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed.” One perceived “conflict” for Trump? That Mueller once disputed fees relating to his membership at a Trump golf club in Virginia.

Three of the Report’s most daunting conclusions:

· “The evidence accordingly indicates that news that an obstruction investigation had been opened is what led the President to call McGahn to have the special counsel terminated.”

· “Substantial evidence indicates that the President's effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the special counsel's investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President's and his campaign's conduct.”

· “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

This explains why Rep. Justin Amash, the rare Republican on Capitol Hill with reading glasses, sees “a consistent effort by the president to use his office to obstruct or otherwise corruptly impede” the investigation.

Mueller doesn’t go that far. As he said Wednesday, a president can not be charged with a federal crime while he is in office, so it would “be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.”

Yet he carefully noted, “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

For two years, then, Mueller and staff did essential work. They did not leak preliminary findings to Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson. They ignored Stormy Daniels. They have not publicly castigated the report’s editing by William Barr.

They chose their words carefully, and you should read them with similar vigilance and dispatch.

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com