WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump mounted an extensive effort to stop or interfere with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into him and his campaign, Mueller concluded in a final report that suggested Trump may have committed obstruction of justice but did not explicitly accuse him of this.Mueller said he “did not establish” that Trump or his campaign conspired with the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 election, validating Trump’s frequent claims.But the report was nothing close to the “total exoneration” the president had claimed upon the release of a misleading description from the attorney general in March. Mueller outlined evidence of repeated Trump attempts to shut down or limit the investigation.He concluded that Trump met the three-part test for an obstruction offence when he made a serious effort to get Mueller fired, told the then-White House counsel to lie that this never happened, tried to get the then-attorney general to sharply narrow the scope of the investigation, tried to get the then-FBI director to stop investigating his former national security adviser, and tried to influence the testimony of former aides.“The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” Mueller wrote, “but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” Mueller rejected Trump’s lawyers’ claims that a president cannot possibly commit obstruction.He suggested that he did not make a direct accusation, in part, because of a long-standing Department of Justice position that a sitting president cannot be indicted.“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgmen ...
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