During Attorney General William Barr’s Senate hearing on Wednesday, he insisted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “work concluded when he sent his report to the Attorney General. At that point, it was my baby.” It sounded as if Mueller had birthed a baby and given up the child to Barr for adoption. (The President had urged abortion, so to speak.) Then, we learned this week, Mueller, as a concerned birth parent, wrote what Barr described as a “snitty” letter with pointed instructions on how better to raise said baby. I happen to be a teacher of constitutional law, criminal law, and family law, but never did I imagine this particular intersection of all three areas.

The adoption metaphor may shed some light on the conflict in Congress around the meaning and outcome of Mueller’s investigation. Upon receiving the special counsel’s report, which provided ample evidence that Donald Trump obstructed justice but which did not “make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” about whether he committed a crime, Barr, in a four-page memo to Congress, announced his own judgment that “the evidence developed by the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” Given that Mueller’s team decided not to “draw ultimate conclusions” on that issue, it was undoubtedly the Attorney General’s job to assess the evidence in the report and to make the prosecutorial judgment on whether the President committed a crime. After Mueller demurred on that question, it was indeed Barr’s baby to raise as he judged proper.

Mueller, however, disapproved of Barr’s decision to paper over the report’s damning core. In his letter, Mueller said that Barr’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions,” and that there was “now public confusion about critical aspects of our investigation.” Mueller urged the immediate release of executive summaries of the report that he and his team had produced, to “alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen.” Now that Mueller’s letter to Barr has appeared in the press, some Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have said that Barr—who told a House committee he did not know the basis of reports that Mueller’s team was frustrated with his memo—lied to Congress, a criminal and impeachable offense. Barr, in turn, has ignored a deadline to deliver the unredacted report to Congress and refused to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, leading to accusations of contempt of Congress.

Barr may not have been a faithful and accurate messenger of Mueller’s intentions, but that matters little now that Congress and the public can read the report themselves. The real difficulty is that Mueller, by declining to charge or exonerate Trump, enabled a bifurcated outcome: a prosecutorial decision not to indict the President and a congressional decision to impeach him. Mueller effectively had twins who could go their separate ways—one with the Attorney General and one with Congress. He was determined to own neither the prosecutorial nor the congressional judgment. The prosecutorial one belonged to Barr. It is time to focus on the congressional one, which also belongs to the public.

Obstruction of justice has been a basis for articles of impeachment against two Presidents in the past fifty years: Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. The House voted to impeach Clinton for obstruction of justice and perjury, in 1998, in connection with his efforts to cover up his affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Four years earlier, the independent counsel Kenneth Starr had been appointed to lead the Whitewater investigation, which involved the Clintons’ alleged misconduct in real-estate investments. As that investigation was petering out, without establishing their criminal conduct, Starr shifted course and produced a report on the President’s lies regarding his relationship with Lewinsky and his efforts to obstruct Starr’s investigation. The Starr report ultimately concluded that there was “substantial and credible information that President Clinton committed acts that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.” The House followed suit, voting for impeachment, though the Senate failed to convict and remove him.

Mueller could have been as prescriptive as Starr in his conclusions. The evidence in his report certainly rises to substantial and credible information that Trump obstructed justice. So why didn’t Mueller state that there may be a basis for impeachment? He may share the widespread belief that Starr overstepped his authority. He also had to be mindful of the special-counsel regulations, which were written as a rejection of the broad (and now expired) independent-counsel law that allowed Starr to be so “independent” as to run amok. Though Starr explicitly recommended and outlined grounds for impeachment, the special-counsel regulations now in effect indicate that Mueller’s job is solely to “provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions”—not to make any recommendations to Congress based on his findings.

Furthermore, recall that Democrats overwhelmingly considered the impeachment of Clinton to be unjustified, even outrageous. That was not because they were unconvinced by the evidence showing that Clinton repeatedly lied under oath and obstructed justice, including allegedly encouraging Lewinsky to give false testimony. Rather, it was because, as Chuck Schumer, then a House Representative, said, Clinton’s actions “were wrong and possibly illegal but did not warrant impeachment.” Senator Joe Biden said that “it is our constitutional duty to give the President the benefit of the doubt on the facts,” and that “the President’s actions do not rise to the level required by the Constitution for the removal of a sitting President.” Biden warned against the argument that “the President is a disgrace to the office, I honor and revere the office of the Presidency, so there must be some way to get this man out of that office. Therefore, his actions must rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.” He asked his fellow-senators to ask themselves, “Can you legitimately conclude that you would vote to remove a sitting President if he were a person towards whom you felt oppositely than you do toward Bill Clinton?”

The presumed answer, of course, was no. But why? Obstruction of justice, like perjury and contempt, is known as a “process crime”—an offense against the integrity of the administration of justice. People may obstruct justice by hiding evidence, intimidating witnesses, or misleading law enforcement, in order to impede investigation of a crime as serious as murder, as minor as marijuana possession, or even no crime at all. Prosecutions of process crimes are commonplace and important for maintaining general confidence in our justice system. But whether we think a particular punishment is fair tends to track with our views of the underlying crime. Often, we may feel discomfort about the legitimacy of charging obstruction where it seems “pretextual”—that is, when someone is targeted for a process crime because prosecutors found insufficient evidence of the substantive crime that they originally suspected. This was part of the reason why many liberals expressed outrage about the conclusion of the Starr investigation. After all, the Whitewater investigation had turned out to be a bust, and Clinton’s affair with an intern, though embarrassing to him and scandalous to the public, was not a crime.