Mueller: Charging president with a crime was 'not an option we could consider'

Special counsel Robert Mueller said Wednesday that charging President Trump with a crime "was not an option we could consider" due to Department of Justice (DOJ) regulations.

Mueller said that his office interpreted current DOJ guidance that states a sitting president cannot be indicted as meaning his team could not bring a charge against Trump as they investigated him for obstruction of justice.

The special counsel said that the Constitution requires a "process other than the criminal justice system" for taking disciplinary action against a sitting president, but did not mention impeachment directly.

Mueller also reiterated that while his final report "does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

"After that investigation, if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so," Mueller said.

Mueller noted that the DOJ guidance, in the form of an opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, "explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president because it’s important to preserve evidence when memories are fresh and documents are available."

And he noted that the opinion would have prohibited him from filing a charge under seal that could be made public once Trump left office.

Mueller did not clarify whether his office would have charged Trump with a crime if the DOJ guidance had not been in place.

But he said that "it would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge."