Conservative columnist cuts through Trump’s spin on Mueller’s final report and explains why Trump isn’t close to being vindicated
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
President Donald Trump has been gloating over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited final report for the Russia investigation, boasting on Twitter that it showed “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION.” And much of the right-wing media has been echoing that assertion. But conservative journalist Max Boot has a very different perspective, explaining in his Monday column for the Washington Post why he doesn’t see Mueller’s final report as a total vindication of Trump and his associates.
“Trump has gotten a big and unexpected political boost from the end of the Mueller investigation,” Boot asserts. “What he did not get was a clean bill of ethical health.”
Boot writes that although Mueller evidently concluded that the Trump campaign’s actions in 2016 “did not rise to the level of ‘conspiracy’ or ‘coordination’ with ‘the Russian government,’” there are still many reasons why Trump and his associates are hardly spotless.
For example, Boot writes, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort “shared campaign polling data with a business associate linked to Russian intelligence”—and Trump “had been trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 campaign, and his attorney, Michael Cohen, had lied to Congress about this.” Boot adds that “Trump himself called on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mails (‘Russia, if you’re listening’) on the very day when Russian intelligence hackers first tried to do so.”
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