Nearly a month after the Mueller report’s release, the question on half of the country’s mind is: how the hell was Donald Trump not charged with obstructing justice, given the numerous episodes in which Robert Mueller described exactly that? The answer is twofold: first, Mueller declined to draw a conclusion regarding whether Trump tried to hinder his probe, because Justice Department guidelines say you can’t indict a sitting president anyway. And second, Attorney General William Barr decided to clear the president himself, claiming that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation [was] not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” despite having not actually looked at all of the underlying evidence himself. To be clear, Barr isn’t saying that he chose not to charge Trump because a sitting president can’t be charged with a crime, but that Trump never obstructed anything in the first place. Yet according to a whopping 426 former federal prosecutors (and counting!), Trump most certainly did obstruct justice, regardless of whether there was an underlying crime, and would be facing trial right now if not for his current job.

In a statement released Monday, over 400 attorneys who worked in every Democratic and Republican administration going back to Eisenhower said that Mueller’s findings quite obviously demonstrated obstruction. “Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice,” the former federal prosecutors wrote. “We emphasize that these are not matters of close professional judgment,” they added. “Of course, there are potential defenses or arguments that could be raised in response to an indictment of the nature we describe here. . . . But, to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice—the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution—runs counter to logic and our experience.”

Among the signatories are Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration; Bill Weld, a former U.S. attorney and Department of Justice official from the Reagan administration; Paul Rosenzweig, who was senior counsel to Kenneth Starr; John S. Martin, a former U.S. attorney and federal judge who was appointed to his posts by two Republican presidents; and Jeffrey Harris, who served as the principal assistant to—wait for it—Rudy Giuliani, when the now-Trump lawyer was at the Justice Department during the Reagan administration. Weld told The Washington Post that he added his name to the statement because he believes the evidence “goes well beyond what is required to support criminal charges of obstruction of justice,” adding that he “hope[s] the letter will be persuasive evidence that Attorney General Barr’s apparent legal theory is incorrect.”

According to the Mueller report, after Trump learned he was being investigated for obstruction, he told then-White House counsel Don McGahn to have Mueller removed; when that failed, he tried to get a message sent to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to narrow the scope of the special counsel’s probe. Of that incident, Mueller wrote that there was “substantial evidence” to show Trump was trying to “prevent further investigative scrutiny” of himself and his 2016 campaign. “All of this conduct—trying to control and impede the investigation against the President by leveraging his authority over others—is similar to conduct we have seen charged against other public officials and people in powerful positions,” the former federal prosecutors wrote in their statement, saying that prosecuting those cases was “critical because unchecked obstruction—which allows intentional interference with criminal investigations to go unpunished—puts our whole system of justice at risk.” Last week, Barr told lawmakers that it wasn’t a crime for the president to demand staffers lie to investigators, as Trump did in the case of McGahn, whom he now really, really doesn’t want to testify before Congress. A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined the Post’s request for comment; a D.O.J. spokeswoman pointed to Barr’s previous public comments on the matter.

The signatures were collected by Protect Democracy, a nonprofit group whose staff includes D.O.J. alums. In a statement, one of the group’s attorneys said, “We strongly believe that Americans deserve to hear from the men and women who spent their careers weighing evidence and making decisions about whether it was sufficient to justify prosecution, so we agreed to send out a call for signatories. The response was overwhelming. This effort reflects the voices of former prosecutors who have served at D.O.J. and signed the statement.”

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