THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

First, there was President Trump's June 2017 direction to the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to fire the special counsel in the wake of news reports that he was investigating the president for obstruction of justice -- and Mr. Trump's later insistence that Mr. McGahn create a false internal memorandum that would contradict reporting about this order.

Then there was President Trump's instructions, in summer 2017, to his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was then a private citizen, to direct Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mr. Mueller's investigation with the intent to, as stated in the report, "prevent further investigative scrutiny of the president and his campaign's conduct."

Democrats also noted Mr. Trump's repeated instructions that Mr. Sessions "unrecuse" himself from running the investigation, which Mr. Mueller said in the report lead to a "reasonable inference" that the president wanted his attorney general to act as a shield from the investigation.

And finally, Mr. Mueller described how Mr. Trump sought, in part through his private attorneys, to influence the cooperation and testimony of several possible witnesses, including his former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former lawyer Michael Cohen, by making public and private threats, and by floating the possibility of pardons.

These facts, starkly affirmed on Wednesday by Mr. Mueller after months of mischaracterization of his report by the president and others, are catastrophic.

Despite Mr. Mueller's unwillingness to speculate on hypotheticals, and his adherence to the Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president, these facts, which he also outlined in depth in his report, make clear that were Mr. Trump an ordinary person, he would have been indicted on multiple counts of obstruction of justice, as more than a thousand former federal prosecutors, free of those limitations, have observed.

Robert Mueller on Wednesday condemned President Donald Trump's repeated praise of WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election. According to the former special counsel, Trump's public embrace of the organization--even as it was regularly releasing Hillary Clinton campaign emails hacked by the Russian government--was tantamount to promoting "illegal activity."

"Problematic is an understatement, in terms of what it displays, in terms of giving some hope or some boost to what is and should be illegal activity," Mueller said after Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) read direct statements from Trump expressing admiration for WikiLeaks. Mueller also said he agreed with Mike Pompeo, who as CIA director in 2017 called Wikileaks a "hostile intelligence service." Pompeo is now Trump's secretary of State.

It was a striking moment from the former special counsel, who had spent the bulk of his back-to-back congressional hearings on Wednesday largely repeating the findings of his lengthy report. On this matter, however, Mueller appeared to offer a personal indictment of Trump's conduct.

Tweet   @brothersjudd