Dense legal memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel typically don’t command the nation’s collective attention, let alone lend themselves to easily digestible sound bites. So the media coverage and political discussion around an apparent dispute between Robert Mueller and Attorney General William Barr over the impact of OLC opinions on the former special counsel’s investigation of potential obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump has been a bit confusing.

The OLC’s longstanding view has been that federal prosecutors can’t indict a sitting president. Mueller, at his high-profile press event this week, reiterated that his investigators accepted the position that indicting a sitting president “is unconstitutional” and that charging Trump with a crime “was therefore not an option we could consider.”

Democrats want to be able to say that the only reason Trump wasn’t indicted is because he’s the sitting president, that being in the Oval Office put him above the law. But Mueller’s office has been careful to deprive them of a clean way to say that without caveat. And Trump supporters have seized upon the public uncertainty, leaving many Americans with the false belief that Mueller’s report cleared Trump and that it’s time for everyone to move on.

Barr and Mueller issued a carefully worded joint statement this week claiming there was no dispute between the two men over their views on how the OLC’s views on indicting a president shaped the Mueller investigation. But that might be overly diplomatic.

In a highly criticized press conference ahead of the mid-April release of a redacted version of the report, the attorney general said that he’d pushed Mueller on whether the special counsel’s team would have sought an indictment “but for” the OLC opinion.

Mueller, Barr told reporters, “was not saying that but for the OLC opinion, he would have found a crime.”

In fact, what Mueller explained this week and in his report was that, under his interpretation of the OLC’s views and Justice Department policy, he couldn’t even attempt to reach a decision on whether the president committed a crime. They couldn’t open that door at all. Mueller’s team believed that directly suggesting that the president committed crimes that he couldn’t be charged with would be unfair to Trump.

If they accused Trump of committing a crime without charging him, he wouldn’t have the ability to clear his name in court, Mueller’s team wrote. “[A] prosecutor’s judgement that crimes were committed, but that no charges will be brought, affords no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator,” Mueller’s team wrote.

Following DOJ policy, Mueller said in his prepared remarks, his team determined they “would not reach a determination ― one way or the other ― about whether the President committed a crime.” He said his office would not comment “on any other conclusions or hypotheticals” about Trump.