editor victoria’s comment ~ my intuition told me to look further into this term: Obstruction of Justice. what does it mean? how is it defined and applied? an excellent analysis.
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May 23, 2019
Regardless of how an obstruction law might read, no citizen who is innocent of a crime should ever be found guilty of having obstructed justice if his actions facilitated a correct conclusion regarding it.
A line must be drawn. No longer can the phrase “obstruction of justice” be allowed to mean something obscenely different from what any fair-minded, free person knows it was intended to mean. In the minds of most, the phrase refers to blocking the discovery of truth, truth being the only legitimate basis on which appropriate redress can be made for some wrong that has been suffered.
Any codified law that uses the phrase “obstruction of justice” to mean something other than precisely this is in jeopardy of obstructing true justice. If a law is needed to insure that an official investigation is not obstructed, then the language of the law must refer to obstruction of an investigation or obstruction of police work or obstruction of intelligence activities. Any reference to this sort of thing as “obstruction of justice” assigns a specialized definition to the word “justice” that does more than just legalistically narrow its established commonplace meaning; it creates a misleading new meaning with the explicit intention of illegitimately assigning to some formal entity all the virtue that English-speaking people naturally and universally associate with the word “justice.”
The Department of Justice is not synonymous with “justice.” We all sincerely hope that the Department pursues true justice most of the time, but anybody with any worldly experience knows that sometimes it doesn’t. Obstructing the activities of the Department of Justice should not be automatically viewed as obstructing justice. Even if the Department of Justice is behaving honorably, a person who interferes with its investigation to keep it from arriving at a false conclusion should not be found guilty of obstructing justice. Only a person who attempts to block the department from discovering something true should even be considered for prosecution based on obstruction of justice.
This brings us to President Trump and the Mueller Report. Mueller found that there was no compelling evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Given the nature of our legal system, this effectively clears Trump of the charge — and that charge was the predicated reason for doing the investigation in the first place.
The remaining controversy now before us is whether Trump obstructed justice while Mueller investigated the matter. For Trump to have done so, he would have had to hinder Mueller’s team from establishing his lack of guilt. How silly! It is irrational to think Trump would have deflected Mueller from discovering Trump’s innocence (the recognized status of anybody who is not guilty).
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