What Happens After The Mueller Report
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | March 21, 2019
“The American people and Congress have a right to know this information and, in fact, to have the entire Mueller report and findings made public.”
Every week, the media starts buzzing that the Mueller report is coming any day now. One of these weeks the buzz will be right.
The end of the Mueller investigation represents an inflection point in the effort to find out what happened in the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath.
But this is by no means the end of the investigation into President Trump and his associates, which will go forward in multiple arenas after the Mueller investigation ends.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who works for the Justice Department, will follow Department policy, which says a sitting President cannot be indicted. Attorney General William Barr will not make the serious mistake that FBI Director James Comey made and will not discuss the problems with other individuals who are not indicted. This would violate Justice Department policy.
But it would be a catch-22 and would make no sense for Attorney General Barr to say that we cannot indict the President, and, since he is not indicted, we cannot make public Mueller’s findings about the President.
The American people and Congress have a right to know this information and, in fact, to have the entire Mueller report and findings made public.
Meanwhile, as the Mueller investigation heads toward a conclusion, there are multiple investigations proceeding in the House involving President Trump and his associates that include the Russia-related investigation but also go beyond it. There are also multiple investigations going on in New York involving President Trump, his associates, and the Trump Organization.
As has been recently noted about the Mueller investigation, quoting Winston Churchill, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
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Fred Wertheimer is the Founder and President of Democracy 21, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen our democracy and ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections. See previous Notes from Fred here.
