Fox News' Andrew Napolitano: Mueller is saying he 'would have' indicted Trump if he could

Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano believes Special Counsel Robert Mueller's first public statement in two years reinforces the idea that he had enough evidence to indict President Trump.

Napolitano spoke on Fox Business after Mueller's press conference, Mediaite reports, and concluded that the special counsel "effectively" said, "We had evidence that [Trump] committed a crime but we couldn't charge him because he's the president of the United States ... the president can't be indicted. Otherwise, we would have indicted him." Napolitano also characterized Mueller's statement as suggesting that "we could not say that he did not commit a crime ... because we believe he did."

Mueller said during his press conference that "if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so," also saying that due to Department of Justice policy, charging the president was "not an option we could consider."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Napolitano also spoke on Fox News and said that the White House "can't be happy" about Mueller's statement because he "opened up a can of worms of Democrats yet again" by suggesting Trump only wasn't charged with a crime "because he's the president."

Trump isn't the only one coming out of this press conference looking bad, though. Napolitano described Mueller's statement as being a "parting shot" at Attorney General William Barr, noting that Mueller's statement is "far harsher" than anything Barr has said and is "hurtful" to the attorney general.