IG report should end Mueller investigation

Andrew McCarthy:

While generally cautious about criticizing Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Clinton-emails investigation, Trump supporters have taken aim at its chief logical flaw: Although key investigators harbored anti-Trump and pro-Clinton bias, and even made statements indicating an intention to act on that bias, the IG did not find that this bias was the proximate cause of any particular investigative decision.

This conclusion is easy to rebut; I did so myself in a column last week. Yet, the Trump camp should also be embracing it. Why? Because if this is the Justice Department’s position, then Special Counsel Robert Mueller has no business investigating the president for obstruction.
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I have argued from the start that Mueller’s appointment was illegitimate, because Rosenstein did not comply with federal regulations, which, among other things, do not provide for appointment of a special counsel to conduct a counterintelligence investigation. More saliently for present purposes, I have also contended that the obstruction investigation is illegitimate because the president undeniably has the constitutional authority to remove the FBI director (he does not need a reason) and to exercise prosecutorial discretion by opining on the merits of an investigation (since the Constitution makes prosecutorial discretion a unilaterally executive power).

The logic of the IG’s report gets us to exactly this position, albeit by a slightly different route.

Mueller would apparently circumvent the president’s constitutional defense through an untenable theory of corrupt intent. That is, the special counsel would posit that if the president takes a lawful action for an arguably corrupt purpose, he can be accused of obstruction. We have countered that this is specious. There is no doubt that a president can legitimately be accused of obstruction based on clearly criminal actions (e.g., witness tampering — see: the Nixon and Clinton impeachment proceedings). But if a president’s actions are lawful on their face, it is not the place of a subordinate executive officer, such as a prosecutor, to question the chief executive’s motives — especially under circumstances in which the president does not need any reason to take the action at issue.

In essence, IG Horowitz is saying the same thing in his report.
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There is more.

I see another reason for stopping the Mueller investigation.  The whole Russian investigation is tainted by the corrupt motives of the anti-Trump partisans at the top of the FBI.