The Mueller Report Did Not Clear Donald Trump

Donald Trump is trying to justify his commutation of Roger Stones sentence, and he's doing it by once again attacking Mueller's investigation and the report of that investigation. He wants people to believe that the investigation was a hoax" and a "scam" -- and that the report cleared him of any wrongdoing. That is just another of his many lies!
Here's what Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Carrie Dann, and Melissa Hilzberg of msnbc.com had to say about that:
The Russia investigation, which began this summer four years ago, is back in the news — with President Trump on Friday commuting Roger Stone’s prison sentence, with Robert Mueller’s op-ed defending Stone’s prosecution, and even with Jeff Sessions’ Senate runoff tomorrow in Alabama.
And despite everything that’s happened since Mueller concluded his probe in early 2019 (including Trump’s impeachment over Ukraine and the coronavirus pandemic), that investigation remains one of the biggest political scandals in generations.
Here are the indisputable facts:

1. 1. Trump and his campaign asked for Russia’s help in the 2016 presidential race. ("Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing"; "If it's what you say, I love it.")
2. 2. Trump and his campaign got that help — in a contest decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. ("Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks.”)
3. 3. Roger Stone lied about his contacts with Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks. (“He lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks. He lied about the existence of written communications with his intermediary. He lied by denying he had communicated with the Trump campaign about the timing of WikiLeaks’ releases,” Mueller wrote in his op-ed.)
4. 4. The president commuted Stone’s prison sentence, despite White House aides disagreeing with the move. (“Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency,” the White House said on Friday.)
5. 5. And Stone admitted his objective was protecting Trump. (“[Trump] knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t,” Stone told NBC News analyst Howard Fineman before his sentence was commuted.)

Yes, some of the liberal theories about Russia investigation never came to pass (Michael Cohen didn’t travel to Prague; that “pee tape” appears to be fantasy). And, yes, Mueller concluded that his investigation didn’t establish “that that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” (Though note he said “Russian government” and not intermediaries like WikiLeaks.) But what did happen was a bigger scandal — involving a foreign adversary — than we can remember for any recent administration or major presidential campaign. “An American private citizen worked with foreign spies to damage one presidential candidate and help the other,” David Frum writes of Stone in The Atlantic. “That president accepted the help. When caught, the private citizen lied. When the private citizen was punished, the president commuted his sentence.”