Wednesday, February 20, 2019

What to Expect When Mueller Reports (w/ Update)

There's been noise today from reputable sources that Mueller is about ready to end his grand jury investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections and trump's possible involvement. There's been a lot of speculation - is trump in jail yet? - but let's get Emptywheel to provide some rational input to this:

When Mueller is done, he has to submit a confidential report to the Attorney General (who is now Mueller’s friend William Barr) telling him what he did and didn’t do. Given everything Barr said as part of his confirmation process, we’re unlikely to see this report.
To assess whether this report is what Pete Williams thinks is coming, we should assess whether public evidence is consistent with Mueller being done.
The answer to that is clearly no. He’s still chasing testimony from Roger Stone flunkie Andrew Miller and from some foreign owned corporation (and has been chasing that, in the case of Miller, since last May).
Given that Miller already interviewed with the FBI for two hours and the foreign company is, by dint of being foreign, a no-brainer target for NSA, it’s quite likely Mueller knows what he’s getting from both of these entities. He just needs Miller on the record, so he can’t change his story to protect Stone, and needs to parallel construct the information from the foreign company. So it’s possible that as soon as Mueller gets both of these things, he’ll finish up quickly (meaning The Report could be soon). But there is no way that’ll happen by next week, in part because whatever the DC Appeals Court says in the Andrew Miller case, the loser will appeal that decision...
As I noted back in November when Mueller’s prosecutors declared Manafort to have breached his plea agreement, this sentencing memo presents an opportunity for Mueller to “report” what they’ve found — at least with respect to all the criminal actions they know Manafort committed, including those he lied about while he was supposed to be cooperating — without anyone at DOJ or the White House suppressing the most damning bits. DOJ won’t be able to weigh in because a sentencing memo is not a major action requiring an urgent memo to the Attorney General. And the White House will get no advance warning because Big Dick Toilet Salesman Matt Whitaker is no longer in the reporting chain...

Emptywheel provides a solid list of all of Manafort's sins, in several instances linking Manafort to Russian contacts which Mueller can prove are tied to the Russian efforts to hack our 2016 elections (and which Mueller already proved in indictment filings earlier on). Back to Emptywheel's arguments:

It’s possible Mueller is close to charging an overarching conspiracy indictment, laying out how Trump and his spawn entered into a quid quo pro with various representatives of the Russian government, getting dirt on Hillary and either a Trump Tower or maybe a bailout for the very same building in which Manafort met with Konstantin Kilimnik on August 2, 2016. In exchange for all that, Trump agreed to — and took steps to deliver on, with some success in the case of election plot participant Deripaska — reversing the sanctions that were such a headache to Russia’s oligarchs.
Such an indictment, if Mueller ever charges it, will look like what Trump opponents would like The Report to look like. In addition to naming Don Jr and Jared Kushner and Trump Organization and a bunch of other sleazeballs, it would also describe the actions of Individual-1 in adequate detail to launch an impeachment proceeding...

Just a reminder, Individual-1 has already been described as trump: They just can't name him directly yet because that would involve presenting charges in full, something that kinda has to wait for last. Anyway, back to the car chase:

There’s one other possibility that would make Williams’ prediction true: if Mueller deliberately triggered the one other way to deliver a report, by asking to take an action William Barr is unlikely to approve, and if Mueller was willing to close up shop as a result, then a report would go to Congress and — if Barr thought it in the public interest — to the public...
The only thing that Mueller might try to do that Barr would not approve (though who knows? maybe what Mueller has is so egregious Barr will surprise us?) is to indict the President...
(give me a few minutes while I whisper OH PLEASE GOD YES to myself, thanks.)

The standing rule with the Justice Department - more of a guideline really - is that you can't indict/charge sitting Presidents. There's no actual LAW, mind, it's just going that route causes all kinds of legal headaches and violent backlash (and I am not joking about this last bit, they just nabbed a SECOND MAGA GUY ready to go on a pro-trump rampage).

Still, it’s hypothetically possible that Mueller believes Trump is such an egregious criminal and national security risk he needs to try to accelerate the process of holding him accountable by stopping his investigation early (perhaps having the DC AUSAs named on the Miller and Mystery Appellant challenges take over those pursuits) and asking to indict the President.
But if that’s what Williams is reporting, he sure as hell better get more clarity about that fact, because, boy would it be news...

Yes, it would.

We've had a bunch of pundits spending the last two years arguing Mueller was never going to find anything, and yet Mueller did (and got a number of guilty pleas and serious indictments as a result). We've had pundits claiming Mueller is never going to find collusion even though he's uncovered constant interaction between Russians and trump's power circles. They've been able to get away with saying all that because Mueller - handling an investigation that has a ton of high-security intel behind it - has run a tight ship that rarely leaks hints about what he's got (and by all reports, Muller knows everything.) There's supposed to be more sealed indictments including at least one for donnie junior himself.

When Mueller does report, it's going to be a bombshell. I can't guarantee it but given everything we've seen there is at least violations of election laws by trump's campaign and a lot of lying to federal investigators involving that. There has to be more indictments involving every major player at that June 2016 trump tower meeting. This can't be wishful thinking on my part.

What will make it terrifying is how trump's fanbase is going to respond. The Far Right punditry is already calling this a coup attempt, stirring up the wingnuts who'll believe them instead of our intelligence agencies sworn to defend our nation.

Stay alert, America. This has been messy and it's going to get worse.

Update 2/24: Again, it seemed like a premature report because here's the weekend and the only big news is tonight's Oscars ceremony (oh and we're about to invade Venezuela re-invoking a lot of the bad blood the U.S. has generated within our hemisphere...).

1 comment:

dinthebeast said...

I just read an article by the guy who wrote the special counsel rules at DOJ that noted the specific mechanisms in those rules meant to prevent the suppression of such reports and information, such as a requirement to report to congress any actions requested by the special counsel but denied by the AG.
He seemed confident that we would see Mueller's report.
My concern is whether those rules will be followed by an administration that doesn't care about such rules very much.
I tend to believe Mueller has thought about that eventuality and planned for it, by all accounts I have read, that's the kind of guy he is.
One thing I would add to your assessment: Mueller has a decades-long involvement in chasing down the Russian mob, and staffed his team with specialists in mob prosecution. Fergus very likely laundered money for the Russian mob, whether he knows he did or not, and as you pointed out, Mueller knows everything.

-Doug in Oakland