Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report confirmed there was “no collusion” and “no obstruction” between President Trump and the Russian government in the months before the 2016 presidential election.
“Today’s release of the Special Counsel’s report confirms what the President and I have said since day one: there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and there was no obstruction of justice,” Pence said in an official statement from the White House.
The Mueller report, which was released Thursday morning, found that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia or assist the country in its attempts to interfere in the 2016 election. But the special counsel did not make a determination on whether the president committed obstruction of justice, despite investigating 10 possible instances of obstruction.
Pence insisted that there was no obstruction, however.
“After two years of investigation, conducted with the full cooperation of this Administration, that involved hundreds of witness interviews and millions of pages of documents, the American people can see for themselves: no collusion, no obstruction,” the vice president said.
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Pence also called for further investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe, echoing Republicans who have argued that the investigation was based on a partisan agenda and that there was possible wrongdoing among FBI officials.
“Now that the Special Counsel investigation is completed, the American people have a right to know whether the initial investigation was in keeping with long-standing Justice Department standards — or even lawful at all,” Pence said. “We must never allow our justice system to be exploited in pursuit of a political agenda.”
Pence’s statement was the latest move in an aggressive campaign by the White House to respond to the Mueller report. White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway addressed reporters on the White House driveway and said the president had a “clean bill of health.” The president himself also spoke out, saying there “never was” any collusion or obstruction and insisting that such a “hoax” “should never happen to another president again.”
