I'm starting to think that Mueller was thinking all along that he and his team would not be the trigger man for Trump, but let the dice tumble where they may on the US Congress deciding the fate of the POTUS with what he was not allowed to do under Justice Department rules, which included not being able to indict a sitting president.
Mueller couldn't get the job done and had no way of knowing till last November that the US Congress would be the Democrats leading a anti-Trump rally to dump the president.