US special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did not find any evidence of conspiracy or collusion by Donald Trump’s campaign with Russian meddling in the 2016 election but has left open questions if the president obstructed justice by allegedly trying to influence the outcome of the probe.

The investigation “did not establish that members of the members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”, Mueller said in his report, a summary of which, containing principle findings, was released on Sunday.

The report left the issue of obstruction of justice wide open. “While this report does not conclude not the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” Mueller’s reports said, according to a four-page summary attorney general William Barr sent to the Congress and released publically.

But the president and his supporters took the report as a “complete” exoneration. “It was complete and total exoneration… This was an illegal takedown that failed,” Trump told reporters before leaving Florida, where he was for the weekend, for Washington DC.

There was a sense of relief and vindication in the Trump camp at the outcome of an investigation that had hung over the administration for almost two years, casting doubts on its legitimacy. There was rarely a day when the president did not rail against it, calling it a “witch-hunt”, a “deep-probe”.

“He’s just very happy with how it all turned out,” a White House spokesperson told reporters on the flight to DC, bringing back the president and his team home after a remarkable weekend that included an announcement that Syria has been rid of the territorial Islamic State caliphate, “100%”.

But their claim of “total exoneration” was not supported by Mueller’s report. It drew instead from a four-page summary of the Mueller report by attorney general Barr sent to the US Congress Sunday, 48 hours after the special counsel turned in his finding to the justice department.

The attorney general said that it was his conclusion, in consultation with others, that evidence developed by the Mueller investigation was not sufficient enough to “establish that the president committed an obstruction-of-justice offense”.

Democrats and critics were not buying into the report.

“The fact that Special Counsel Mueller’s report does not exonerate the president on a charge as serious as obstruction of justice demonstrates how urgent it is that the full report and underlying documentation be made public without any further delay,” Congressional Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement.

Questioned were also raised why Mueller, a well-regarded former FBI director, never interviewed the president, which, according to legal experts, could have been crucial to establishing obstruction allegations, and which Trump’s lawyers had dreaded fearing he would perjure himself, given his propensity for falsehood.

And, others asked, why did the special counsel leave open the question on obstruction of justice, given the many publicly recorded instances of it — dismissing FBI director James Comey after asking him to stop investigating his then national security adviser Michael Flynn for lying about his contacts with Russians.

Then the spin Trump tried to put on a Tump Tower meeting his son, Donald Trump Jr, had taken with a Russian lawyer who had promised political dirt on Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Though it wasn’t immediately clear if Democrats would summon Mueller to testify before the Congress to answer those questions, they would be calling attorney general Barr for sure.

“We will be calling Attorney General Barr in to testify before @HouseJudiciary in the near future,” Jerry Nadler, chairperson of the Democrat-led House judiciary committee, tweeted.

As this political battle shifts now to the Congress to be waged alongside or as a part of other congressional hearings and investigations, Trump’s legal troubles will continue.

The US attorney for the Southern District of New York, for instance, has an open investigation into campaign funding violation in the payment of hush-money to women who claimed to have had affairs with the president in which Trump was implicated by his former personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen.

Mueller began his probe in May 2017, just a few months after Trump took office, to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 elections, which American intelligence had concluded was intended to help Trump; if there was collusion from the Trump campaign; and anything else that came up.

In the 22 months since, the special counsel’s office brought more than 100 charges against 34 people and three companies. Some of them pleaded guilty including the president’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign executive Rick Gates, and one, campaign chai Paul Manafort was convicted.

There are 25 Russian individuals and three Russian entities among those indicted who are unlikely to ever make themselves available for trial in the US.

First Published: Mar 25, 2019 11:33 IST