तुम लड़ो, हम कपडे सम्हालते हैं

Robert Mueller--MC

While watching Robert Mueller’s nine-minute statement yesterday I was reminded of something my dear friend Shireesh Kanekar used to say jocularly in Hindi in a different context. “तुम लड़ो, हम कपडे सम्हालते हैं. (Tum lado, Hum kapde samhalte hain.)” Its lose interpretation is, “You fight while we assure we remain unscathed.” Its literal translation is “You fight while we protect our clothes.”

Watching him deliver his observations practically emotionless, I thought Siri might have brought in more passion to it.  The most fraught part of Mueller’s  observations came when he said that if the special counsel’s team “had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

That is like touching your left ear with your right hand going around the back of your head. He could have directly used his left hand to touch his left ear if that’s what he had in mind.

Does it mean that President Donald Trump somewhat nebulously committed a crime? Or, does it mean that he did indeed commit a crime which did not meet the threshold that would allow a two-year-long investigation to say so? Or, as is widely interpreted, does it mean that but for the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) longstanding policy of not charging a sitting president, he would have happily charged Trump?

Mueller would like us to think it means bits from all three of those options but mostly the first and the third. He said, “Under longstanding department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional.”  “Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider,” he added.

In the same breath—an I use the expression with some license because it was just a nine-minute statement—he also said, the DoJ policy “explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president, because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available.”

He also said that “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”

He essentially tittered on the edge of saying "Do consider launching impeachment inquiry" without going off it.

Overall, the statement was a tease without exposing the word impeachment fully. It would be fair to say that he stopped the tease at “im” which also has the virtue of being seen as I am. (I am kidding, of course.)

My point is Mueller came across as a man of painfully coy rectitude which many— that means just me--thought was in the league of “Tum lado. Hum kapde samhalte hain.”

P.S.: This is perhaps my first Hindi headline to a a post in English.