He did not have the mandate to combat Donald Trump’s illegality.

Robert Mueller speaking to Congress. Source: Flickr

The announcement that the Robert Mueller investigation had found no conclusive proof of a conspiracy against the United States, and his equivocal judgment on obstruction of justice, galvanized both sides of the American political debate. Conservatives felt vindicated and emboldened, immediately pushing the Justice Department to start investigating their own political enemies. Liberals, on the other hand, felt betrayed.

As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick wrote, after the release of Barr’s summary, “progressives, who had convinced themselves that constitutional democracy would be saved only when Robert Mueller led Donald Trump away across the White House lawn in handcuffs, declare defeat.” Some Democrats still tried to push their investigations of the president’s connections with Russia, even though, as the New Republic’s Alex Shepard writes, “when the attention of presidential aspirants does turn to the president, it revolves around his obvious corruption and his coddling of authoritarians around the world.” The headline on Shepard’s article clearly sums up the thoughts of some skeptical liberals after the release of the Mueller report summary: “Give It Up, Democrats. The Russia Investigation Is Over.”

While surely spun by Attorney General William Barr, Mueller’s decision still means a victory for the president. Trump has escaped the grand, detailed pronouncement of wrongdoing that could have ended his presidency. One of the nation’s last neutral arbiters has ruled in his favor. But in understanding the result of the Mueller probe, liberals should look past the final decision and towards the future. The next time a president works with a foreign power to subvert the will of the public, how should liberals respond?

For liberals, the problem with the Mueller investigation is that it was not designed to aggressively investigate the president. Rather, its goal was to lay out the facts behind the Russian operation, investigate coordination with the Trump campaign and associated crimes, and determine whether a collusion-related crime occurred. Contrary to my expectations, the president’s illegal behavior was clearly not a major concern for Mueller and his team. Donald Trump was not subpoenaed or interviewed in person. Even though it is clear that at least “soft collusion” occurred between Trump and the Russians, Mueller’s investigation was not targeted enough to catch or prosecute it. As Michael Cohen’s testimony showed, Trump was too distant and ambiguous in his criminal behavior to have created proof in the form of direct emails or recorded statements.

The framing of the Mueller investigation, according to liberals, should have been an organized crime investigation. Trump’s actions were part of a wide-ranging conspiracy, one that involved well-reported and closely documented lobbying, money laundering, bribes of foreign officials, and campaign finance violations. In order to stop a criminal conspiracy, Democrats did not need a Robert Mueller. They needed an anti-corruption prosecutor in the mold of Chicago’s Eliot Ness or New York’s Thomas Dewey. In the 1920s, Eliot Ness went far beyond engaging in a fact-finding mission or prosecuting the most obvious crimes of the city’s organized crime bosses. He and his associates actively went after mob boss Al Capone, eventually locking up Capone on tax evasion charges and keeping the kingpin in jail until a few years before his death in 1947. Dewey undertook a similar approach to New York’s mob leader Dutch Schultz. Dewey’s focus was on stopping a criminal engaged in criminal conspiracy, which was why he tried Schultz numerous times and was undeterred by a curious acquittal in 1935. Ness and Dewey stopped at nothing to accomplish their goal: end large-scale criminal behavior by a powerful individual.

Democrats need another Ness or Dewey to combat an opponent like Trump, perhaps with the help of a constitutionally sound independent counsel law. If they are able to pass such a law, Democrats have to empower their prosecutor to stop a conspiracy of illegal behavior rather than investigate one incident. If they cannot recruit such an individual to fight the next Trump, Democrats have to be prepared for a middling, equivocal report like the one Mueller issued. Democrats can never again trust that a neutral, fact-finding prosecutor will save them from a Trump-like president.