Surely Fox can't keep Judge Napolitano much longer

[General Mike] Flynn was charged and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about whether he discussed sanctions in a telephone call with then-Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, before Trump became president. Such a communication could have been unlawful if it interfered with American foreign policy.

So, when Trump learned of the lie, he fired Flynn. Yet in his plea negotiations with Mueller, Flynn revealed why he discussed sanctions with Kislyak -- because the pre-presidential Trump asked him to do so. An honest revelation by Trump could have negated Flynn's prosecution. But the revelation never came.

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Trump initially claimed that he had been completely exonerated by Mueller -- even though the word "exoneration" and the concept of DOJ exoneration are alien to our legal system. Then, after he learned of the dozen or so documented events of obstruction described in the report, Trump used a barnyard epithet to describe it.

The Constitution prescribes treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors as the sole bases for impeachment. We know that obstruction of justice constitutes an impeachable offense under the "high crimes and misdemeanors" rubric because both presidents in the modern era who were subject to impeachment proceedings -- Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton -- were charged with obstructing justice.

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[T]he obstructer need not succeed in order to be charged with obstruction. That's because the statute itself prohibits attempting to impede or interfere with any government proceeding for a corrupt or self-serving purpose.

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Mueller laid out at least a half-dozen crimes of obstruction committed by Trump -- from asking former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland to write an untruthful letter about the reason for Flynn's chat with Kislyak, to asking Corey Lewandowski and then-former White House Counse lDon McGahn to fire Mueller and McGahn to lie about it, to firing Comey to impede the FBI's investigations, to dangling a pardon in front of Michael Cohen to stay silent, to ordering his aides to hide and delete records.

The essence of obstruction is deception or diversion -- to prevent the government from finding the truth. To Mueller, the issue was not if Trump committed crimes of obstruction. Rather, it was if Trump could be charged successfully with those crimes.

Mueller knew that Barr would block an indictment of Trump because Barr has a personal view of obstruction at odds with the statute itself. [In Barr's] narrow view, because Trump did not commit the crime of conspiracy with the Russians, it was legally impossible for Trump to have obstructed the FBI investigation of that crime.

The nearly universal view of law enforcement, however, is that the obstruction statute prohibits all attempted self-serving interference with government investigations or proceedings. Thus, as Georgetown Professor Neal Katyal recently pointed out, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted of obstruction for interfering with an investigation of his extramarital affair, even though the affair was lawful.

  Judge Andrew Napolitano @ Fox News

Yes, but he's black.

Famously, Martha Stewart was convicted of obstruction of an investigation into her alleged insider trading, even though the insider trading charges against her had been dismissed.

Yes, but she's a woman.

On obstruction, Barr is wrong.

So, the dilemma for House Democrats now is whether to utilize Mueller's evidence of obstruction for impeachment. They know from history that impeachment only succeeds if there is a broad, national, bipartisan consensus behind it, no matter the weight of the evidence or presence of sophisticated legal theories.

They might try to generate that consensus by parading Mueller's witnesses to public hearings, as House Democrats did to Nixon. Yet, when House Republicans did that to Clinton, and then impeached him, they suffered politically.

And the Dems seem to be worried they'll suffer the same if they impeach Trump. How does it not stand out to everybody that the underlying crimes of Nixon and Trump are light years away from Clinton's actions?  Compare sexual misconduct with burglary of an opponent's records and accepting help from a foreign government/obstruction of justice to win elections.  How do they even compare?

The president's job is to enforce federal law. If he had ordered its violation to save innocent life or preserve human freedom, he would have a moral defense. But ordering obstruction to save himself from the consequences of his own behavior is unlawful, defenseless and condemnable.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.

For how long?

"[U]nlawful, defenseless and condemnable." Kudos to Napolitano for calling it like it is.