“The president is, of course, wrong to claim he was fully exonerated, but it’s also an absurd standard that seems to have been invented solely for Republicans. Prosecutors only have the authority to charge, not to ‘exonerate’ their targets. [Rep. John] Ratcliffe, in fact, asked Mueller if he could cite a single example besides Donald Trump where the DOJ ‘determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined.’ Mueller responded: ‘I cannot, but this is a unique situation.’ After lecturing everyone about how justice must be meted out equally to all Americans, we now hear that rules are malleable if we’re talking about Donald Trump.”
David Harsanyi, The Federalist

“You can argue that we should expect more from a president than to simply have refrained from directly conspiring with a hostile foreign power to reach the White House. Yetthat case becomes harder to make when that is precisely what you have conditioned rank-and-file Democrats to expect from the Mueller report. No dramatic reading of that report, least of all by a 74-year-old clearly no longer accustomed to congressional testimony, will deliver on those expectations.”
W. James Antle III, The American Conservative

“Mueller was slow to react to questions. He frequently asked for questions to be repeated. He sometimes appeared confused. He did not appear to be conversant with some issues in the investigation. He did not, or could not, put together detailed answers even to those questions he agreed to address… Mueller's performance raised questions that reached far beyond one appearance before one committee. It called into doubt the degree to which Mueller was in charge of the entire special counsel investigation…

“If Mueller was not fully in charge, that would direct attention to the staff he assembled for the investigation — staff that President Trump has often derided as ‘17 angry Democrats.’ Some of Mueller's aides were Democratic donors, and a key aide, Andrew Weissmann, famously attended Hillary Clinton's 2016 election night event that was planned as a victory party.”
Byron York, Washington Examiner

Some argue that “it’s not the job of a special counsel, who under the regulations is supposed to act like a typical U.S. attorney, to give a dramatic, passionate, ratings-grabbing TV rendition of his work… It was always a mistake for Democrats to stake so much on Mueller, both by relying on his investigation to do the hard work of making the political case against Trump for them and by elevating him into an oracle who would pronounce authoritatively and unquestionably on the investigation… [Democrats] can investigate or not and impeach or not, as they see fit. For too long, Mueller has been their crutch. Maybe now, they will finally see that he has let them down, and as duly elected members of Congress they should never have tried to subcontract their responsibilities to an inferior officer of the executive branch, who, like all of us, is a mere mortal.”
Rich Lowry, Politico

“The current impeachment efforts are similar to the failed Republican efforts to unseat President Bill Clinton. Then-independent counsel Ken Starr’s investigation also arguably uncovered crimes committed by Clinton; it remains undisputed that the president at the very least lied under oath, committing perjury. Democrats fought the impeachment, however, as a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ and rallied public opinion to their side. They succeeded because there had been a years-long effort by many conservatives to investigate the Clintons driven by partisan animus. The years of vitriol that have been directed at Trump are no different in their origin than those anti-Clinton efforts, and people across the political spectrum clearly see that.”
Henry Olsen, Washington Post