This is wholly incorrect, I think. He had all the normal prosecutorial powers any Federal District Attorney General has. Any prosecution he chose to make was his call, only subject to the normal oversight any DA expects from headquarters above.

I derived this opinion from reading the charging memo written by DAG Rosenstein.

But as I understand it, there are plenty of times when an investigator is sure in his own mind that X is guilty of Y, but also believes there’s insufficient evidence to build a case, at which point the evidence is turned over to the prosecutor, who decides whether he can build a case that will prevail at trial. (Mueller was named Special Counsel and given the assignment to oversee the investigation. He wasn’t a Prosecutor, so if I understand correctly, it wasn’t his call as to whether to prosecute on either the case of Collusion or the charge of “obstruction of justice.”)

It is true that one would hope that, for instance, a police department official would not publicly name a possible suspect in a case where it’s not even reasonably certain a crime was committed. But it seems to me that we often see news statements to the effect that “the police are currently questioning Mr. Joe Blow for the alleged crime of the rape of a woman behind DD’s Bar on the night of February 30 last.”

If anybody even reads this comment at this late date and knows what the law actually is, or can otherwise correct me, I’d be grateful.

Thanks.

400+ pages is really a book, and more of a novel.

Mueller certainly is old, and it’s possible he’s going down hill. It’s also possible he’s not really running the show. Still, he should at least be familiar with the report he’s supervising. Probably he should have read it himself and didn’t. Certainly with the political climate the way it is, he should have sat down with his senior staff and everyone who actually wrote the report (both individually and as a group) and asked “What is Congress going to grill me on?” before he went before Congress.

It’s also possible he’s just being a lawyer, but he’s doing a really terrible job to come off so confused. Maybe he was trying to “act” and miserably failed?

It’s also possible Mueller has an ulterior motive. He’s past retirement and this is the last major thing he’s liable to do in his life. Looking at the Republican action, the failure to rule on obstruction, and the side-stepping of collusion (“Here’s a 2 year investigation on whether the President colluded, but we don’t bother concluding if he did or didn’t”) The whole situation almost looks engineered to edge on the Democrats and Republicans. Honestly, if Russia is trying to disrupt the American system (and, yes, of course they are), little would do it better than Mueller’s exact behavior.

I can’t imagine how much money Mueller would make if he wrote a book after all of this. The report itself is selling as a New York Times bestseller in paperback. It’s safe to say he could afford a very comfortable retirement on the speaking circuit.

Another possibility: it may have just been an off day for him. Maybe he stayed up too late drinking the night before and his trick knee was ailing him and his team lost the game.

Well, that and the other news yesterday that contrary to Brennan’s sworn testimony that he briefed each of the members of the gang of eight individually with the same information when he briefed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the Steele dossier, we learn that Devin Nunez, who was a member of the gang of eight at that time, along with Paul Ryan, says neither he nor Ryan were briefed by Brennan.

Oh.

So Brennan seems somewhat cornered, does he not?

But then, he has in his back pocket another card to play: he can always resort to bargaining for leniency by giving up his superior, President Pseudonym, eh what?

Mueller, like Trump, has been at his craft for too many years to be without error and sin.

It’s hard for me to believe that Mueller doesn’t have a conscience that tries to poke through the interior layers of his long life. And that may be why he seems so umbrageous.

H/T Instapundit.

The Russia scandal was the fruit of a badly flawed political ideology. It is a kind of West Wing view of political power that believes change happens behind closed doors in Washington, rather than as the result of mass mobilization. You don’t need to go out and convince new voters to join your party, or offer them a clear policy agenda. Instead, smart, highly credentialed lawyers will save the day. And Donald Trump didn’t win because he tapped in to an authentic popular anger that needs to be addressed, but because dastardly foreign agents rigged the game.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/27/mueller-investigation-impeachment-fantasy

Of course the majority of the Guardian commenters savaged the article because dammit, Trump did collude and he is a traitor.

Well, OK; but if it were only “stupid stuff” they were doing, it might be bearable.

But they have turned into destructive, violent, vindictive zealots—practically psychopathic in their single-minded goal (at the expense of almost everything else), who believe their destructiveness to be the epitome of morality and view their zeal as righteousness.

Commentators have already been making comparisons to Robespierre and the Jacobins, whose “excesses” were not exactly “stupid stuff”.

I hope such commentary is over the top. But I’m not sure it is.