"Who knows, in the strictness sense and in the end the proper legal definition, there is a possibility that to Mueller the evidence for a charge of the Russia conspiracy/election involvement may not have been legally present."

OK, these are my thoughts on this. First thing you have to consider is that for a special prosecutor to bring charges against the president or those around him the prosecutor has to have an absolute slam dunk case that they have absolutely ZERO chance to lose in court. If there is any tiny chance at all that you might lose then the case, the investigation, the whole ball of wax looks tainted as political.

If there was even the most minuscule chance they could lose in court...meaning that they had literally piles and piles of evidence that pointed to guilt but they saw a tiny little chance for the case to maybe go the wrong way, well...then you can't bring that charge.

This happened in this case and it happened in the Hillary Clinton private server case. I do believe there was evidence against these people that showed guilt but the prosecutors knew and understood that once in court there was a chance that the guilty parties could wriggle away.

SO YOU CAN NOT CHARGE THEM. This does not mean there is no evidence of their guilt...there could be piles of it...it just means that the prosecutors felt there was a chance there could be a legal loophole the guilty party could slip through.

Second, the special prosecutors job was to charge the crimes he found that were a slam dunk, like Manafort and Flynn, and then to compile a report of his findings and put that report in front of the American people...meaning Congress...for them to decide what should be done next.

The special prosecutor does not make a determination...Congress does.

The special prosecutor only charges people with crimes or declines to charge. On people he declines to charge he makes no determination as to their innocence or guilt. He can provide the evidence he has on the person's innocence or guilt. He also begins with a mandate that he CAN NOT charge the president himself. So, before the investigation even starts the president is an AUTOMATIC DECLINE TO CHARGE.

This is where Barr's letter stinks of bullshit. Barr is essentially saying in his letter that since Mueller did not charge Trump (who he could not charge under the guidelines) or people like Trump Jr. and Kushner with crimes...well, not only are they not guilty, they also could not have obstructed justice because there was no crime charged that they could have attempted to obstruct justice for.

Barr himself knows this is a load of nonsense because he knows the bar to have charged these people was "slam dunk or do not charge" and never charge the president period...because only Congress can charge the president.

So, yes, all those times that Trump appeared to be openly obstructing justice and intimidating witnesses...well...those don't count, according to Barr, because you did not charge the president with the crime he was supposedly obstructing justice about...when you were not allowed to charge the president with any crime in the first place.

Joseph Heller would be proud of that Catch-22.