More Thoughts on the End of the Mueller probe – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / now

We’re now getting a clearer picture of what appears to be the conclusion of the Mueller probe. The Post followed CNN’s initial report.

The initial CNN report was solid and now appears confirmed by other reports. But it was jagged, a few chunks of information that were hard to make sense of. The Post piece adds important context and fused the pieces together in a clearer way. At least implicit in the Post’s version of events is that this appears to coming from Mueller’s side. I mean that not just in the sense that it appears to be driven by Mueller rather than some outside force shutting down his operation. I mean it also in the sense it’s not clear to me that the people on the DOJ side, or at least the people talking to reporters, really know what Mueller has planned. There are obviously a range of potential scenarios.

Along that line I wanted to point you to a very helpful run-down by Garrett Graff. Graff is very sharp and has followed the investigation minutely. Equally important he wrote a biography of Mueller before Mueller became a household name. So he has real characterological insight into the man, which is helpful here.

One point which I saw from I think Marcy Wheeler is that there’s another, probably more accurate, way to look at the timing of all this: It likely wasn’t Barr coming in and doing something. It was much more likely Mueller waiting for Barr to be in place to act. That doesn’t mean he was ready six months ago and waited or really had six more months of work but cut it short. But Mueller likely had a real interest in not reporting or concluding during the Whitaker interregnum. Even setting aside the substantive concerns about Whitaker’s unfitness for the job, he was only there in an acting basis. There were also real questions about whether he was even legally Attorney General at all. Given an action of this consequence, with so much at stake about public confidence in what was happening and the legal durability of any result, that makes a lot of sense.

Barr is a former Attorney General who was duly confirmed in the role. Whatever the substantive questions about him, he’s a legitimate Attorney General. He also apparently has a personal relationship with Mueller – not surprising since they’ve both operated at the highest echelons of federal law enforcement. This timing also makes sense of Rod Rosenstein’s departure, though it’s pretty much a given that Barr would bring in his own person to be deputy. That’s entirely normal.

Fundamentally we simply don’t know what is going to happen next week or whenever this conclusion happens. Graff has a good explanation of the range of possibilities. More broadly, based on the subsequent reporting, I think it’s better to see this as ‘Mueller thinks he’s answered the big question, so he’s wrapping up’. As Graff notes, that could be a range of possibilities from just telling Barr that he’s done with a minimal discussion of why he didn’t charge others (and implicitly that he didn’t find collusion) to something far more dramatic.

One final point to note which to me tends to confirm the above points. There’s a passage in the Post article that seems quite significant to me.

According to people familiar with the special counsel’s work, Mueller has envisioned it as an investigative assignment, not necessarily a prosecutorial one, and for that reason does not plan to keep the office running to see to the end all of the indictments it has filed.

The takeaway from the Post is that this makes sense of Mueller’s apparent willingness to hand off the job while a number of the cases remain to be prosecuted. That makes sense. But if this characterization is accurate it suggests something else that is equally important. If it’s investigative assignment that tells me he saw it as core to his brief to determine whether collusion had happened. Or to put it more precisely, to determine whether there had been substantive contacts or coordination between members of the Trump campaign and Russia or a full blown conspiracy. As I’ve said for years now, an answer to that core question is much more important than whether this or that person spends whatever period of time in jail. If that is how he saw the assignment I suspect he is only finishing the probe because he thinks he’s answered the question. And he will at least be reporting back the answer to his superior at the DOJ, i.e., Bill Barr.

What the answer is or how much is revealed, basically what’s going to happen, we just don’t know. We just don’t know and I don’t think anyone really does.

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