The Verdict: President Trump claimed complete vindication after the Special Counsel investigation found no evidence that his election campaign colluded with Russians but reached no conclusion on whether he committed obstruction of justice.

  Trump said on the tarmac while leaving Florida, “It was a complete and total exoneration. It’s a shame that our country had to go through this. To be honest it’s a shame that your president has had to go through this before I even got elected it began. And it began illegally.”

  In a summary of the Robert Mueller report delivered to Congress, Attorney Gen. William Barr said that while the investigation found clear evidence that Russian operators tried to influence the election, “the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

  Franklin Foer writes for The Atlanticthat,  “Lying to the electorate, adjusting foreign policy for the sake of personal lucre, and undermining an investigation seem to me pretty sound impeachable offenses—they might also happen to be technically legal.”

  The hang-up in the report is that Mueller reached no conclusion on “difficult issues of law” as to whether Trump obstructed justice during the investigation. The Barr letter quotes the Mueller report saying, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

  That’s the part Trump skips over when he claims exoneration and calls for investigation of “the other side,” by which he means not the Russians, but the Democrats. He said that “so many people have been so badly hurt” and  “ a lot of bad things happened for our country” He described the Mueller investigation as “an illegal takedown that failed.”

  Once again, he’s claiming that open legal proceedings, while painful for him, are illegitimate.

   The report, which relieves Trump of a lot of pressure, may cause as much turmoil as if it had been absolutely damning. Presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris tweeted, “The Mueller report needs to be made public,” and that  “a short letter from Trump’s hand-picked Attorney General is not sufficient.”

  Standing in front of a Trump-branded tower in New York, fellow candidate Kirsten Gillibrand also called for the full report to be made public and said, “It is not often that I agree with Richard Nixon, but he was right to say that the American people have a right to know whether their president is a crook.”

Crackback:Right wing attacks on the press have already begun for its ardent coverage of the Mueller investigation and two years’ worth of speculation about collusion with the Russians.

  The Republican National Committee sent out an email titled “The Media Was Obsessed With The Democrat Lie.”

  Fox News host Sean Hannity tweeted, “MSNBC CONSPIRACY NETWORK LIARS FAKE NEWS CNN LIARS NY TIMES WAPO LIARS”

The Survivor Suicides:A second survivor of the 2018  massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida has died in “an apparent suicide,” police announced. This came less than a week after the suicide of a 19-year-old graduate who also survived the shooting deaths of 17 people at her school.

  The latest is described only as a male sophomore. 

The Sports Page:Twenty-nine-year-old Rob Gronkowski, the brutally dominant tight end who helped lead the New England Patriots to win three Super Bowls in nine seasons, announced his retirement from football. He’s considered one of the best tight ends ever to play the game. The sometimes goofy and frat-boyish Gronk said in an Instagram post,“Thank you for everyone accepting who I am and the dedication I have put into my work to be the best player I could be.” He finishes with 521 catches, 7,861 yards and a Patriots-record 79 touchdowns. Gronkowski didn’t say why he’s retiring but expect to see him on television and maybe even in movies.— Top-seeded Duke narrowly avoided elimination from the NCAA basketball tournament last night when Central Florida rimmed out on two crucial shots in the final moments. Duke was down three points in the last 45 second but won 77-76. The tournament is down to 16 teams.

The Obit Page:Rafi Eitan, the Israeli spymaster who directed and led the capture of the notorious Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, has died at age 92. 

  Eitan had a hand in a lot of big operations; the 1981 bombing of  Iraq’s nuclear plant, the theft of enriched uranium from the US, and the assassination of the Palestinian terrorists who massacred Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. 

  “In principle, when there is a war on terror you conduct it without principles,” Mr. Eitan said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in 2010. “You simply fight it.”

  He was most famous for personally grabbing Eichmann, the architect of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” as he got off a bus in Argentina in May, 1960. “I grabbed him by the neck with such force that I could see his eyes bulge,” Eitan later recalled. “A little tighter and I would have choked him to death.”