IT'S AN IMPEACHMENT REFERRAL:

The division between the two volumes is not for ease of understanding. Practically, it reflects the shift from the two retrospective tasks of the Special Counsel's charge--to investigate responsibility for the 2016 Russian election attack and any Trump campaign links to it--to a third, real-time task: to prosecute anyone who might obstruct the investigation as it progressed. As the main person criminally obstructing it turned out to be the President, this required its own volume.

Almost metaphysically, however, the two volumes divide across a change of state created by Trump's inauguration as President. With that institutional event, both Trump's person and his actions changed status, and so did the nature of the evidence collected. The "candidate," then "president-elect," became President of the United States, a being with alternative powers, privileges, and opportunities for criminality. His contacts with Russia became less legally culpable as they could pass for statecraft, and Mueller stopped documenting relevant evidence of rewards to the Kremlin and communications with Putin. Most neglectfully, Mueller did not subpoena or interview Trump, the knower at the center of the evidentiary threads, because he now sat in the office of the President. On the other side of the inaugural chasm, however, Trump's comments about the FBI investigation, and hints to its agents as well as its targets, became far more culpable, as he would now appear as the "boss" of all federal police action and thus a puissant obstacle to its independent duties--and, with his pardon power, the undoer of all threat of punishment to those likely to be convicted of federal crimes.

The most discussed finding of the Mueller report forms the legal crux of Volume II: that President Trump may have committed criminal acts of obstruction of justice in ten separate instances. But it also finds that it cannot say so legally, nor prosecute these crimes on its own. The Special Counsel's office considered itself bound by a Justice Department guideline that Presidents cannot be indicted for crimes, and articulates a prosecutorial-ethical norm that prosecutors must not publicly accuse of crime anyone who cannot immediately be indicted. Volume II strongly implies that Congress, instead, is the venue in which our government should pursue the President's crimes of obstruction, using the Special Counsel's hundreds of pages of evidence and documentation as a roadmap. It implies that federal prosecutors, too, may wish to charge these crimes of obstruction once Trump, the person, is no longer President.

The evidence and recommendations of Volume II have dominated subsequent discussion of the Mueller report. The implications are clear enough to rivet all opponents of Trump's presidency.  Robert Mueller, a Republican lawman, with the most conservative temperament and following the most conservative legal reasoning, concludes that President Trump cannot be proven innocent of crimes of obstruction of justice. Trump misused the powers of the Presidency to protect his own family, his confederates, and himself. He tampered with witnesses and attempted to subvert the course of justice through executive power--crimes of obstruction that exceed those for which Nixon was impeached and resigned and Clinton was impeached and remained. If you care at all about obstruction of justice and the powers of the law and police, these crimes are extreme, and certainly impeachable.

However, most of us don't care much about hindrances of the powers of law and police except when they're on the trail of larger crimes against society. Al Capone did not singularly outrage society by avoiding taxes. The State is right to pursue collateral crimes when the real crimes, whether through skill, accident, or lack of legislative anticipation, are unpunishable or not yet on the books. If Trump and his campaign did not actually cheat in the election; if they were not disloyal; if they did not welcome, encourage, and benefit from a foreign attack on the United States; if they won fairly, operated independently, and were not open to blackmail by the Kremlin, and did not seem to pay off with benefits to Russian foreign policy--then Trump's obstruction of government investigations could seem like what Attorney General Barr has implied it to be: a partly understandable, personal peculiarity of a generally paranoid person.

That is why Volume I of the Mueller report matters more than Volume II. The remarkable result of Volume I is to confirm that two and a half years of investigative reporting was correct: the Kremlin contacts with the Trump campaign were real and substantive, and they fit in at key junctures with the Russian attack on the election. It looks as if the Russian attack and the Trump campaign coordinated. They betrayed the country and its electorate, Republicans and Democrats. And the actual situation, as far as the Mueller investigation was able to show, was much clearer and easier to follow than the press had been able to prove.

In briefest summary: Mueller discovered that candidate Trump was the one who reached out initially, in 2015 and 2016, to particular, named officials in the Kremlin to ask for real estate favors and benefits. They then reached out in return in 2016, once Trump had become the Republican candidate, to offer assistance in winning the election. The head of Trump's presidential campaign began sending back their internal polling and targeting information to Kremlin intermediaries, and in apparent response to Trump's public call to Russia to "find" Hillary Clinton's "secret" emails, Kremlin-backed hackers stole emails from Clinton's campaign. Through WikiLeaks, Russia released the stolen emails in ways timed to harm Clinton's campaign and aid Trump's--timing of which candidate Trump may have had knowledge. Upon election, both the Trump side and the Kremlin sought to build out channels of secret communication, through which the Trump staff promised material benefits once Trump was in office. These are documented by the Mueller report as facts.

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