April 23, 2019

If you lay it out in a color-coded chart, the cases against Donald Trump are not that complicated:

As the creator of the chart, Quinta Jurecic, points out at Lawfare:

The key question is how Robert Mueller and his team assessed the three elements “common to most of the relevant statutes” relating to obstruction of justice:

an obstructive act,

a nexus between the act and an official proceeding,

and corrupt intent.

As Mueller describes, the special counsel’s office “gathered evidence … relevant to the elements of those crimes and analyzed them within an elements framework—while refraining from reaching ultimate conclusions about whether crimes were committed,” because of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)’s guidelines against the indictment of a sitting president.

The... heat map is an effort to simplify Mueller’s analysis of the evidence in relation to the three common elements of the obstruction statutes.

A picture speaks a thousand words. Trump is guilty except for that convenient for Trump DOJ provision that you can't indict a sitting president.

Thanks very much to Quinta and Lawfare for their work.

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