Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast today is Thursday, May 30, 2019.

I'm John Puthhord. It's the editor of commentary with me as always senior editor A Greenwald

hi A. Hi John. Associate editor No Rothman. Hi Noah. Hello John. And in Washington,

senior writer Christine Rosen. Hi Christine. Hi John. So guys, well, we got nothing to

talk about right? Nothing. So Bob Mueller, the panel council came out, I sort of gave

it an eight or nine minute speech and that said nothing new. So the question was why

we give it and what was the purpose and of course, I think the answer is that he wished to

emphasize a couple of points from his 400 page report so that the only voice interpreting

it was not so far the only voice interpreting it is Attorney General Bill Bars and so

he wanted to make his own points about what was important and aside from saying that the

Russians, you know, worked to hack us and that was really bad. He explicitly said if he

could have exonerated the president, he would have exonerated the president and he couldn't

that he was not permitted under Department of Justice guidelines to study the question of

whether or not the president had violated the law but that it was important to examine

the issue of obstruction while people's memories remained fresh and so that the fact pattern

could be established. Though for what purpose it is unclear, it was to be established if he

could not be if he could not be indicted and then said but there's a process other than indictment

to deal with potential crimes. So effectively leaving in the air the question of whether or

not what he had spent two years doing or the part of the investigation that looked into

obstruction was to provide information to Congress that Congress could then use potentially

in an impeachment inquiry. Now this is of interest to me in this one way which is since when does

the executive branch work to establish an investigative pattern for the legislative branch?

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