At the bottom of the White House’s huffy complaints about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, there is a lonely kernel of truth. President Trump’s lawyers apparently hoped Mueller would blink in the face of the dilemma that the Justice Department’s prohibition against indicting a sitting president presented him. Trump plainly broke the law, but the rules under which Mueller served require him only to explain his decisions about whom to prosecute. A different special counsel might have simply noted that he declined to prosecute Trump, or that he would have prosecuted Trump but for the policy forbidding it, either of which would have made it fairly straightforward for Attorney General William Barr to conceal the nature and extent of Trump’s wrongdoing.