Slate: All the Mistakes Mueller Made in Declining to Prosecute Donald Trump Jr.

Robert Mueller let Donald Trump Jr. off the hook too easily for potential campaign finance violations that arose from the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Russian operatives. Mueller’s questionable exercise of prosecutorial discretion is bad news for how campaigns and foreign entities might conduct themselves in the run-up to the 2020 elections.

Like many others, I am still poring over Mueller’s 448-page partially redacted report. My initial general impression of Volume 1—the part dealing with Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the connections between Trump—is that Mueller and his team did a thorough and fair job in investigating what happened and in describing the facts. But on the potential campaign finance violations, Mueller fell short in numerous ways. …

Mueller made some other questionable choices. While Trump Jr. could have been charged with illegally coordinating with the Russians to make an illegal foreign expenditure, Mueller describes the law defining coordination as too uncertain. In fact, as Common Cause’s Paul S. Ryan explains in this thread, there is both a federal statute and case law defining the term, and Trump Jr.’s conduct seems to fall within it.