A summary
Mueller investigation wrapping up, or being wrapped up by new AG, who knows.
Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce as early as next week the completion of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller’s confidential report, according to people familiar with the plans.
A summary. Fantastic. How will anyone know what was left out? No one will. Wonderful.
Barr has said that he wants to be as “transparent” as possible with Congress and the public, “consistent with the rules and the law.”
Under the special counsel regulations, Mueller must submit a “confidential” report to the attorney general at the conclusion of his work, but the rules don’t require it to be shared with Congress, or by extension, the public. And, as Barr has made clear, the Justice Department generally guards against publicizing “derogatory” information about uncharged individuals.
And it’s DOJ policy that sitting presidents can’t be charged yadda yadda YADDA so the reeking criminal gets to sit there like a toad for two more years and use all the power at his disposal to rig another election and sit there for four more years if he doesn’t explode in a fireball of BigMacs and ice cream first. Fabulous. We’ve got this criminal evil monstrosity in there and we cannot get rid of him no matter what we do, no matter what crimes and cheats and thefts Miller has uncovered. It’s all been pointless. Fucking brilliant.
Unless, you know, she’s the Democratic nominee for president. Then the FBI director holds a press conference to admonish her extensively before conceding there will be no charges.
Oh yes, that.
I wouldn’t be too pessimistic about this news. If Mueller is wrapping up his investigation, it’s most likely because he’s ready to wrap it up, not because Barr ordered him to and he’s just going gently into that good night.
It’s been quite clear for some time that Mueller has been planning for the possibility of Trump (or Sessions or Whittaker or whoever) ordering the investigation shut down. McCabe’s recent comments confirm that plans were in place to ensure that investigations couldn’t be easily quashed.
At a bare minimum, Congress would be told what is happening. The special counsel regulations provide that if the DOJ (meaning Barr in this instance) refuses any investigative step — and I think “continuing the investigation” would qualify — that gets reported to Congress.
It’s always been questionable whether there would be a thick tome to be referred to as the Mueller Report. The current regulations were written with the idea that Ken Starr’s investigation generally, and the Starr Report specifically, was NOT a model to emulate. Some knowledgeable folks have suggested that the various indictments kind of ARE the public form of the “report,” to be supplemented only by whatever summary of the statutorily-required confidential report gets released.
As far as I know, though, Congress retains the power to subpoena Mueller and his team for testimony and documents. So even if Barr suppresses pretty much everything, that needn’t be the end of the story.
If there’s any aspect of the investigation closing that would disappoint me, it’s that we’re not seeing any indictment of Don Jr. (I suppose it could still be sealed? I’m not sure about the rules on how long and why they can be sealed.)
Also note that the SDNY and NY AG probes are separate from Mueller — and there’s good reason to think that SDNY may be just as damaging to Trump as anything Mueller was pursuing.
Ok. It’s just that the catch-22 kind of drives me crazy – can’t indict a prez and “the Justice Department generally guards against publicizing “derogatory” information about uncharged individuals” so hahaha gotcha. Ignore the H Clinton exception which is irrelevant because oh dear a cat is on my keyboard.
I get it — that article’s juxtaposition of those two things doesn’t create a heartwarming impression!
But I think the one thing you can count on is that Democrats in the House will use their investigatory powers to the fullest. I think after sitting through years of hearings on Benghazi! and seeing the GOP rewarded rather than punished for that waste of time, the Dem leadership is not going to hesitate to pursue as many of the actual legitimate Trump scandals as they have time for. (And since not a ton of legislation is going to get passed with the GOP Senate, that leaves a lot of time!)
I never really had a ton of hope in terms of criminal charges. Even among people who believe you can indict a sitting president, many of them say that’s all you can do in terms of criminal procedure — file the indictment, and then wait out the president’s terms before conducting the actual trial. I suppose the indictment would have some symbolic value, but I don’t know if there’s much difference politically between “Trump has been indicted” and “Trump would be indicted if he weren’t president.”