David Kendall, a prominent attorney representing both Bill and Hillary Clinton, said special counsel Robert Mueller's failure to reach a conclusion on whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice "was a massive dereliction" of duty.
Kendall, who represented former President Bill Clinton during independent counsel Ken Starr's investigation, made his comments in a column posted by The Washington Post on Monday evening.
"Mueller's conclusions on conspiracy are debatable, but they should be respected as a traditional prosecutorial judgment," he said.
"But the failure to draw any conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice was a massive dereliction of the special counsel's duty, and the report's explanation of this failure is both incoherent and illogical."
Kendall noted it did not take long for Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to decree the president did not obstruct justice.
"This exoneration was made possible by a massive flinch: Mueller failed to follow Justice Department regulations, which say a special counsel 'shall provide' the attorney general a confidential report 'explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the special counsel.' The special counsel is not authorized to bypass the required binary decision; he must decide to prosecute or not."
And he added: "Though the Mueller report said it was not exonerating the president, it left the coast clear for Barr to do just that."
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