Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that President Trump would have been indicted over the actions described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report had he not been a sitting president.
“I think there’s enough there that any other person who had engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted,” Clinton said during her remarks at the Time 100 Summit. “The whole matter of obstruction was very directly sent to the Congress. And if you read that part of the report, it could not be clearer.”
Mueller concluded in the report that Trump and his associates had not engaged in collusion with Russia but declined to weigh in on whether a number of Trump’s actions during the investigation — including his decision to fire FBI director James Comey and his attempts to have Mueller fired — constituted obstruction of justice. The report instead left that determination up to Congress.
“With respect to whether the President can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded that Congress has the authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice,” the report read.
The details of the report have split Democrats on the question of impeachment. Party leaders in the House have continued to insist that no impeachment proceedings are forthcoming, while several 2020 presidential candidates, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, have called for such proceedings to be initiated since the redacted version of the report was released last week.
In her remarks Tuesday, Clinton echoed House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s view of the matter, saying impeachment should “be something undertaken in a really serious, diligent way, based on evidence,” and adding that Pelosi is “right to be cautious” about it.