Conway questions why Mueller left obstruction of justice question unanswered in report

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Kellyanne Conway: Mueller report closes door on haters putting an asterisk on Trump's presidency

After the release of the Mueller report, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway says the case is closed on critics challenging the legitimacy of Trump's election.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway questioned on Sunday why Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not rule whether or not President Trump obstructed justice during the Russia investigation and argued that Mueller leaving the ruling open means that Trump has been exonerated.

“That’s not really the job of a prosecutor. The job of a prosecutor is to gather evidence and decide whether to indict or to decline to indict,” Conway said on ABC’s “This Week.” “They declined to indict. The president is not going to jail, he’s staying in the White House for five-and-a-half more years,” Conway said. “Why? Because they found no crime, no conspiracy. That was the central premise.”

In the redacted report released last Thursday, Mueller declined to make a decision on whether or not Trump obstructed justice with his efforts to curtail the special counsel’s investigation, but he did lay out in the report multiple episodes in which Trump directed others to influence or curtail the Russia investigation after the special counsel's appointment in May 2017.

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Those efforts "were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests," Mueller wrote.

In one particularly dramatic moment, Mueller reported that Trump was so agitated at the special counsel's appointment on May 17, 2017, that he slumped back in his chair and declared: "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm f---ed."

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In June of that year, Mueller wrote, Trump directed White House Counsel Don McGahn to call Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the probe, and say that Mueller must be ousted because he had conflicts of interest. McGahn refused — deciding he would sooner resign than trigger a potential crisis akin to the Saturday Night Massacre of firings during the Watergate era.

According to the report, Trump also ordered McGahn to deny a January 2018 New York Times story that detailed the president’s efforts to have his counsel fire Mueller.

Trump also made another attempt to alter the course of the investigation, meeting with former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and dictating a message for him to relay to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The message: Sessions would publicly call the investigation "very unfair" to the president, declare Trump did nothing wrong and say Mueller should limit his probe to "investigating election meddling for future elections." The message was never delivered.

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On the McGahn incident, Conway did not dispute the former White House counsel’s statement during her interview on Sunday, but she expressed her doubts that McGahn would have continued in his post if the events had played out the way they did in the report.

“I believe that Don McGahn is an honorable attorney who stayed on the job 18 months after this alleged incident took place,” Conway said. “If he were being asked to obstruct justice or violate the Constitution or commit a crime — help to commit a crime by the president of the United States — he wouldn’t have stayed.”

Conway added: “I certainly wouldn’t stay.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.