The Atlantic: The Much-Heralded End of the Mueller Investigation

[BumRushDaShow]

The Much-Heralded End of the Mueller Investigation
No one knows when it will actually “wrap up”—or what it will mean when it does.

Feb 12, 2019
Mikhaila Fogel Associate editor of Lawfare
Benjamin Wittes Editor in chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

Everyone is saying it: The Mueller investigation is winding down. The acting attorney general declared the investigation “close to completion” during a press conference. His wife, Marci Whitaker, has also insisted that the special counsel’s investigation is “wrapping up.” President Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, William Barr, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that, given his public actions, Mueller is “well along” in his investigation. The press is buying it. NBC says we could be looking at “mid-February” for a delivery of the so-called Mueller report; that would be, well, now. Yahoo! News reported that the probe could be “coming to its climax potentially within a few weeks”—a few weeks ago. There have also been reports that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has been overseeing the investigation, will likely step down soon, but only after the completion of the Mueller probe.

Other sheep entrails and tea leaves are signaling the end as well. Certain investigators in the special counsel’s office are being reassigned to other offices within the Justice Department. There are now only 12, as the president has said, “angry Democrats” (translation: lawyers) working on the Mueller team. (Peter Carr, a spokesman for Robert Mueller, listed the 12 lawyers on Mueller’s staff in an email this morning, along with two attorneys who are still representing the special counsel’s office on specific matters, despite having been reassigned to other Justice Department components.) We are also seeing a migration of investigations into the president’s conduct from the special counsel’s office to other Department of Justice offices, most notably the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, and the proliferation of new investigations entirely outside the special counsel’s domain.

Yes, some of the sheep guts are pointing in other directions, too. In January, Mueller extended the grand jury investigating l’affaire russe for an additional six months. The prosecutors are dealing with pending litigation, most notably the Andrew Miller and the mysterious Sealed v. Sealed grand-jury cases, not to mention ongoing prosecutions such as the newly filed Roger Stone case. And there are likely outstanding, yet-to-be-filed criminal matters in the Mueller probe as well; Jerome Corsi—who, by his own admission, was offered a plea agreement by the special counsel in November and proceeded to disclose that agreement to the press—has not yet been charged. Of course, remember that Mueller was going to be finished “shortly after Thanksgiving”—that is, Thanksgiving 2017—before he was going to be finished by or around January 1, 2018, before he was going to be finished by June 2018, before he was going to be finished by mid-February.

But there’s actually a bigger problem than the possibility that all this eager Mueller-is-wrapping-up chatter may be wrong, just the latest instance of overly hasty anticipation of the Muellerpocalypse: No one knows what Mueller’s “wrapping up” actually means.

More: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/when-will-mueller-finish-his-investigation/582592/

A good read...

[underpants]

1. Thanks

[BumRushDaShow]

2. Was glad to see a count

of all the "it's wrapping up" declarations!