What's Next For Trump and America Now

Editor's Note: This is a non-member column (open to all).

No collusion.  No conspiracy.  No coordination with the Russian government “despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign” during the 2016 presidential election.

That’s the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s exhaustive nearly two- year investigation into whether the President of the United States or anyone on his team was involved in what would have been the greatest scandal in American history. Despite non-stop speculation -- and flat out allegations of the president's guilt -- from both Democrat partisans and liberal journalists that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin got together to corrupt our electoral process, it didn’t happen.

The special counsel’s conclusion, as reported in a four-page summary by Attorney General William Barr, is good news – and not only for President Trump.  It’s good news for America.

Try telling that to Democrats who were hoping for the worst.  For all their concern that the 2016 presidential election was rigged, you’d have every right to wonder if a rigged election is precisely what they wanted from the Mueller Report.   If Mr. Trump colluded with the Russians he not only would be impeached in the House, he’d be convicted in the Senate.

And that’s what progressives have been dreaming of from the moment Donald Trump became president.

So now that they can’t go after the president on collusion, Democrats are hanging their hopes on the possibility that he might have obstructed justice, an impeachable offense.

“Mr. Barr also said that Mr. Mueller’s team drew no conclusions about whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed justice,” the New York Times reported. “Mr. Barr and the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, determined that the special counsel’s investigators lacked sufficient evidence to establish that Mr. Trump committed that offense, but added that Mr. Mueller’s team stopped short of exonerating Mr. Trump.”

The president’s lawyers (and other supporters) have said that absent an underlying crime – conspiracy with the Russians – the obstruction of justice possibility is a dead end.   Not to Democrats in the House it isn’t who point out that the president could still be found guilty of obstructing justice, underlying crime or no underlying crime.

So now that the Mueller Report has been completed, Democrats will have to come to grips with an issue that’s been simmering for a while now:  whether to begin impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump.

The American people will have a say on that matter. Polls will soon tell us if they want Democrats to pick up where Robert Mueller left off – or if they have had enough.

If the Democrats pursue impeachment to please their hard left base, if they do it at the expense of an electorate that may have grown weary of non-stop investigations, they’ll be handing President Trump a gift, which he’ll unwrap in November of 2020.

There’s more to come, either through leaks or the public release of  more details. Stay tuned.