Trump's narrative has not ended

President Donald Trump is not off the hook yet, even though the report of special counsel Robert Mueller did not conclude conclusively that Trump, or his aides and close relatives, had colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential elections. However, the report hinted in so many words that the president did have several suspicious contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding their personal relations.

The report also failed to find out whether Trump has criminally conspired to obstruct justice with regard to the Russian affairs, but several nuances were mentioned in the report suggesting that the president did, in fact, obstruct justice.

On the obstruction of justice point, Trump fired so many of his key Cabinet members because they refused to accommodate his wishes to abort the Mueller investigation. That much was well documented in the report, including President Trump's remark to then-attorney general Jeff Sessions that it was “the end of my Presidency. I’m f…”. That is how much Trump feared the investigation process, and his determination to nip it in the bud never ceased.

It is a well-known fact that since his election, Trump forced the resignation of a number of his key advisers for refusing to obey his illegal instructions to abort all investigation of his conduct, including former FBI director James Comey, White House counsel Don McGahn and Sessions. This is not to mention the firing of his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen for cooperating with the US Congress.

Trump is not out of the woods yet, and while by strict legal criminal rules he could not be found as having committed a felony, his conduct to thwart the Mueller probe amounted to series of efforts to obstruct justice, perhaps not on the strict application of the law, but certainly on the basis of the higher ethical and moral standards applicable to a head of state.

The conduct of heads of state is not governed by the strict application of the criminal code, but rather by much higher rules which Trump had clearly violated.