Robert Mueller couldn’t have made it any clearer. In his first public remarks since taking the helm of the Russia investigation, the former special counsel said in no uncertain terms that the reason his team didn’t charge Donald Trump with a crime is because they didn’t view it as a legal option. “The Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing,” Mueller said. And yet, William Barr—the attorney general who misled the public about the nature of Mueller’s report, and who’s now investigating the president’s investigators—is continuing to twist Mueller’s words.

In an interview Friday morning with CBS News, Barr suggested that, due to a lack of evidence, Mueller simply couldn’t make up his mind about charges. “I think Bob said he was not going to engage in the analysis,” Barr told host Jan Crawford. “He was not going to make a determination either way.” Barr implied that Mueller then left the decision to him and Rod Rosenstein, who concluded that the conduct outlined in the report didn’t amount to obstruction of justice. “We analyzed the law and the facts and a group of us spent a lot of time doing that and determined that both as a matter of law, many of the instances would not amount to obstruction,” Barr said, basically admitting that he had disregarded any of Mueller’s analysis he “didn’t agree with.”

But Mueller was not punting on the issue of criminal charges, as Barr implied, because he at no point viewed that as a viable end result of his investigation. Instead, the former special counsel saw Congress as the audience for his report, believing it was up to lawmakers, not the law, to deal with the president. “A president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office,” Mueller said in his brief press conference Wednesday, citing longstanding Department of Justice policy. (Notably, that’s the opposite stance Barr took in early May, when he told Congress that his department “accepted the Special Counsel’s legal framework for purposes of our analysis . . . in reaching our conclusion.”)

Of course, there’s some logic behind that policy. As Mueller explained, “it would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.” However, if Congress refuses to serve as a check on the president’s power, that same policy also effectively puts the president above the law. That’s currently the case on Capitol Hill, where top House Democrats are reluctant to launch impeachment proceedings when the Republican-controlled Senate would almost certainly decline to convict. As such, the policy itself has come under fire. On Friday, Senator Elizabeth Warren outlined a plan to “make it clear that Presidents can be indicted for criminal activity, including obstruction of justice.” “Donald Trump believes that he can violate the law, and he believes that the role of the Department of Justice is to help him get away with it. That’s not how our country is supposed to work,” wrote Warren who, incidentally, was one of the first high-profile Democrats to call for Trump’s impeachment following the Mueller report’s release. “Congress should make it clear that the President can be held accountable for violating the law, just like everyone else.”

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