Bill Maher speaks for many who simply cannot let go of the Mueller team of Trump-haters and their efforts to conjure a crime to pin on Donald Trump. 

Specifically, he cannot let go of Mueller’s statement that “we cannot exonerate [Trump]” of obstruction of justice. He said so on his television show, "Real Time with Bill Maher" on Jan. 22, 2023.

Speaking to President Trump's former attorney general, Bill Barr, Maher said:

[T]he one thing I … hold against you is that when the Mueller report came out … I feel like you mischaracterized it … You said the evidence … is not sufficient to prove that [Trump] committed an obstruction of justice offense.  That’s not what Mueller said.  He said that if we had confidence that [Trump] did not commit obstruction of justice we would have so stated.  So, I feel like that was shady, Bill and I just had to get that off my chest.

Maher here manages to get things precisely backwards.  Mueller’s statement that he cannot exonerate Trump is precisely what displays Muller’s bias against Trump.

Meanwhile, Maher’s determination to resuscitate Mueller’s inappropriate attempt to smear Trump demonstrates his own bias against Trump.

Before, however, we examine the details of Maher’s accusation against Barr, one must remember the context. 

What Maher is unhappy about is Barr’s alleged “shady” dismissal of Mueller’s refusals to “exonerate” Trump. 

First, however, Mueller’s team was not set up to investigate Trump for obstruction of justice.  It was set up to investigate Trump for collusion with Russia.  Mueller was unable to find any collusion with Russia because the Steele dossier used to justify the Mueller investigation was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to frame Trump and cheat the American people out of their right to choose the president in a fair vote. 

That is, since the Mueller investigation, having been established on dishonest grounds, should not have been started in the first place, Trump, and the nation in general, was the victim of typical Clinton “dirty tricks”.  If Maher wants to find something “shady” one would think that should be at the top of the list but for some mysterious reason, perhaps the big “D” behind Hillary’s name, he does not seem concerned about that.  Instead, Maher is exercised because he thinks Trump obstructed an investigation that was established on false pretenses to frame him of a crime.  Recall that Maher once comically said that Trump’s public joke about Russia hacking Hillary’s e-mail to get her mishandled classified files was treason.

Returning to Maher’s original accusation that Barr did something “shady” by summing up the findings of the Mueller report inaccurately since, according to Maher, the Mueller report “speaks for itself,” Barr was wrong to give a summary of the main findings of the report.  “You didn’t have to do that,” Maher says to Barr.

In fact, Barr’s response to Maher on this charge is entirely precise and correct, which is just what one expects of someone with a J.D. from a top law school. 

Barr states that he asked Mueller for a redacted report because it would be illegal to release the unredacted report, which contained classified information, but Muller only gave him an unredacted report. 

Since the level of hatred for Trump generated by the Left had people at the time calling for Trump to be sent to prison, and since uncertainty would damage the economy and America’s image abroad, Barr replies that if he was to diminish the potential damage to the country he had no practical choice but to sum up “the bottom line” of the report, namely, to state that, first, Mueller found no Trump-Russia collusion, and, second, that Mueller “punted” on the obstruction charge.  Maher is just wrong that Barr “didn’t have to do that.” 

Barr also shows that Maher is wrong again when he states that he (Barr) said that Mueller found Trump innocent of obstruction.  Barr correctly replies that since Mueller “punted” on obstruction, he [Barr], states his own opinion on the obstruction charge.  That is, he [Barr] did not say that Mueller found Trump not guilty. Barr stated that Barr found Trump not guilty.  Got it yet, Maher?

Finally, consider the point that many still take as the coup de grâce to Trump, namely that Mueller stated that he “could not exonerate” Trump! 

In fact, Mueller, Maher, and rather too many overly emotional partisans, appear to have forgotten that we are talking about the United States here, not the old Soviet Union.  The United States has this thing called “the presumption of innocence” (one is considered “innocent until proven guilty”).  It could never have been Mueller’s task to prove that Trump did not commit some crime.  In the United States, at least until the Democrat-media collusion team decided to frame Trump for a succession of crimes, we believed that the prosecution job is to try to demonstrate that the accused committed a crime and if they cannot do that then the accused is declared, “Not guilty!”  We also used to believe, in the old days when the US was free, that this should be the end of the matter.  The reason for this principle is that without it, dishonest prosecutors would always be able to smear innocent people in the service of their own agenda.

It may be useful to rehearse the traditional reasoning here: Since it is, as it is said, impossible to “prove a negative,” that is, impossible to prove that someone is innocent or that they did not secretly do something, it would always be possible for an unscrupulous prosecutor to say that, “we cannot prove X obstructed justice by telling Y to lie under oath, but, who knows, X might have met with Y in a dark alley somewhere we do not know about and told them to lie under oath.” 

Can Bill Maher prove that he never had sex with his frequent guest Michael Moore?  Let's see the proof!

It was, therefore, inappropriate of Mueller to state that he could not exonerate Trump on obstruction of justice. 

If one assumes traditional American principles of justice, which, admittedly, can no longer be assumed when Trump and other conservatives are accused, Mueller should have stated that he could not prove obstruction and left it at that.  The fact that Mueller did not do this, and that some people cannot let this go, demonstrates that they are not interested in justice.  They are interested in smearing Trump “by any means necessary” and that is un-American.

It is precisely because of that climate of the hysterical Democrat-media generated hatred of Trump for their own political purposes that Barr was right to state the bottom line: Mueller could not prove either of his accusations against Trump.  In the United States, until recently, that used to mean: “Not guilty!”  Not anymore, and that is what is really “shady.”

Finally, Maher begins the clip with Barr stating that Trump “literally tried to steal … one of the most honest well-run elections ever”.  Maher can be congratulated for getting the Democrat-media script word-for-word but, difficult as this is to believe in the choir, some of us peasants believe we have multiple reasons to disagree.  Perhaps this topic can be looked at later. 

Image: Screen shot from Real Time with Bill Maher video, via YouTube