Hillary Clinton said Congress should see the full, unredacted Mueller report in order to have all the necessary information for an investigation into President Donald Trump's behavior. | Brian Ach/Getty Images for TIME Mueller Investigation Clinton says Trump escaped indictment only because of DOJ policy

Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that President Donald Trump escaped obstruction of justice charges only because of a Justice Department rule barring the indictment of a sitting president.

"I think there’s enough there that any other person who had engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted," Clinton said at a TIME magazine event in New York. "But because of the rule in the Justice Department that you can’t indict a sitting president, the whole matter of obstruction was very directly sent to the Congress."


Clinton's 2016 electoral defeat was once again thrust in the spotlight on Thursday after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's redacted report, which detailed the 22-month probe into Russian interference in the presidential election.

The report said the special counsel found evidence of Russian meddling in the election but said there was insufficient evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Mueller also did not take a stance on whether the president obstructed justice, citing a Watergate-era policy in the Justice Department not to indict a sitting president. Such action would leave the president with no legal recourse to clear his name or protections normally afforded to criminal defendants, according to the report.

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“Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought,” the report says.

In his report, however, Mueller detailed 10 episodes where Trump tried to interfere with the Russia investigation. He also wrote that Congress has authority to conduct its own investigation of the president's behavior.

Clinton on Tuesday called for the release of an unredacted version of Mueller's report to allow lawmakers the information necessary to move forward with a thorough investigation.

In the days since the publication of the report, the question of whether to initiate impeachment proceedings has hung over Democrats. Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday rejected calls to immediately take the politically risky move of launching efforts to oust Trump.

Pelosi's strategy earned the approval of Clinton, who said impeachment — a drastic move that Democratic leaders worry could cost their party the House in 2020 — should not be fueled by "partisan political purposes."

"I think her argument was we want to show the American people we take our constitutional responsibilities seriously," Clinton said.

Like Pelosi, she advocated for a "careful" approach, describing impeachment as something that should be undertaken "in a really serious, diligent way, based on evidence."

That means giving Congress access to key information. Clinton said she thinks it's "fully appropriate" for Congress to call upon former White House counsel Don McGahn, who emerged as a central figure in investigations after telling special counsel investigators Trump ordered him to fire Mueller. The House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to McGahn on Monday demanding that he testify in public on May 21.

Clinton compared buzz about impeaching Trump to the two most recent congressional pushes to eject sitting U.S. presidents. Clinton had an inside look at both proceedings as the wife of Bill Clinton and as a young staff attorney on Richard Nixon's impeachment proceedings in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

The failed efforts to oust her husband, initiated in 1998, were nothing but a partisan ploy, Clinton said — a stark contrast with the lengthy and in-depth investigation she described that led to Nixon's resignation.

The comments from the TIME event marked Clinton's first public remarks on the Mueller report since its release. The former candidate and secretary of state said she thinks Russian interference "certainly had an impact" on the 2016 election results, but said her priority now is to make sure similar foreign interference does not affect future elections.