President Trump and his legal team likely exhaled last month when special counsel Robert Mueller’s office notified them that the president is not being treated as a suspect in the Russia investigation at this time. Mueller’s disclosure to Trump’s lawyers will come as a piece of good news for a legal operation that desperately needed a reprieve from the ceaseless negative coverage of the probe. The Washington Post reported that a faction of the president’s attorneys are holding out hope that the lack of an indictment will be the beginning of the end of an investigation that has lasted for 10 months and which has evolved into a comprehensive inquiry on everything from possible collusion with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential campaign to the influence of foreign money in U.S. politics.

While Trump is not a target of the special counsel at this stage, he is still a subject. That means that however the White House wants to spin this latest development, Trump is hardly out of the woods Mueller is an astute law enforcement professional who understands the nuances of Justice Department guidelines and legal precedent like the back of his hand. And he recognizes all too clearly that it would highly unusual, indeed unprecedented in American history, if he decided to file a charge against a sitting president. Even assuming Mueller’s team of prosecutors believed it was proper on the merits to charge Trump with a crime, there is more than a decent chance that Mueller would restrain himself from making that decision in order to save himself from the agony of the inevitable White House appeal to the Supreme Court.