I'm not paying a whole lot of attention to the fallout over the Mueller Report, largely because I think the pressing issue is not what the Attorney General says is in it but what's actually in it. I suppose my position is exactly the same as any Trump supporter's would be if a brief summary of a 300+ page report was issued by a Democratic A.G.: Never mind the summary. I won't believe anything until they release the entire report plus all the supporting evidence. And I might not even believe it then.
We should not be surprised that Trump and his minions are running around claiming "total exoneration." For more than a year, Trump has been running around saying "No collusion" and claiming exoneration more often than Henny Youngman said, "Take my wife…please" and he'd misquote anybody. If a weatherman said there would be no rain Thursday, Trump would say, "The weatherman just said there was no collusion and I'm totally exonerated."
I guess the idea here is that (a) they'll stall and fight and stall and fight to keep the entire report locked in a vault somewhere with Trump's tax returns and (b) they'll assume his supporters won't — or maybe can't — read and will just accept and celebrate that it says what Trump says it says so the matter is settled forever.
And I don't mean they won't read that huge report that Robert Mueller's office put together. They won't read the little summary they now celebrate. They haven't or they'd know it says the exact opposite. On page three of the Attorney General's summary, he says…
The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction. Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as "difficult issues" of law and fact concerning whether the President's actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
Only Donald Trump could take a statement that says "it does not exonerate him" and interpret it to say, "It exonerates me." Okay, well not just Trump but also Sean Hannity and Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway and the rest of that mob. I suppose they'd claim they mean it exonerates him on the colluding with Russia part and maybe it does. But that's not the story they're selling to their base.