>>You can’t have obstruction without a crime.<<
I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect that you can have obstruction without an underlying crime, since obstruction itself is a crime.
Trump could have, for example, paid off Mueller to stop his investigation, and do so just for political reasons unrelated to Russian collusion, i.e., just to get him off his back permanently.
That would be (I think) obstruction. The corrupt intent would be satisfied by the fact there was a payoff.
AG Barr cited the lack of collusion because it goes to motive. If there was no collusion, then President Trump’s motive for wanting the investigation stopped (or hindered by, say, firing Comey) could not have been to stop the investigation from revealing said collusion. But it could have been obstruction for another reason entirely. I’m not saying it was, just that you can’t rule it out because the crime being investigated didn’t occur.
I suspect, given the makeup of the attorneys hired by Mueller, that most of them desperately want Trump driven from office prematurely. They probably salted the full report with plenty of opinions that this or that action by Trump and his administration could have been obstructive. Some probably even felt that his “Fake news” proclamations were obstructive.
All of those opinions in the report will eventually come out, simply because Mueller said in his report that he couldn’t conclude one way or the other whether there was obstruction, that there was evidence on both sides. Had he not done that, the matter would be ended. I doubt Mueller wanted it to end, however, so his action is a ploy to keep the investigative apparatus going in other venues. It gives the left a way to keep the narrative going which, as we’re seeing, is exactly what’s happening.
I am also not a lawyer, but I think the sequence of events goes like this:
1) Investigation
2) Indictment — a criminal accusation that a person may have committed a crime
3) A trial of the evidence against the person accused of committing a crime
4) A verdict against the accused, either guilty or not guilty.
Mueller stopped at 1)
His investigation couldn’t even muster up enough information to say that a crime had been committed, let alone a criminal accusation against the president.
They didn’t have enough gas in the tank to really even start this thing. They fooled around for over 2 years and spent millions of dollars, but couldn’t really even start anything.
Possible obstruction? Possible? That basically means that Trump might be a ham sandwich, but everyone knows he isn’t.
Yes, but only when the obstruction itself is a crime, like bribery, threatening a witness, destruction of evidence, etc. All of these demonstrate "corrupt intent", and "corrupt intent" is one of the required elements of obstruction of justice. I was just paraphrasing what Barr wrote in his memo