Two reports are now claiming that the Robert Mueller investigation is coming to an end and this has, of course, caused a bit a frenzy among people concerned the investigation has been cut off. After all the public still knows very little about all the dozens of loose ends still to be tied up.
We have hundreds of questions about various aspects of the Russia scandal and yet according to these reports the investigation is winding down and Attorney General William Barr is set to make a report to Congress as early as Feb. 25th. I personally believe this is great news!
The investigation stage was just the fact-finding part of a two-part process. Think about everyone who has been charged in the Mueller investigation so far. They basically fit into 2 groups! Group A is people who the Special Prosecutor sought and attained cooperation agreements with.
People like Mike Flynn, Robert Gates, and Michael Cohen.
These are people the Special Council had to get legal leverage over in order to guarantee their cooperation. People who were only charged with smaller, so-called “process crimes” that were much less significant than the crimes kept off the books in exchange for information that likely led to much “bigger fish.”
Group B were all people with whom a deal was attempted but ultimately refused. People like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. The former vowed to never turn on the President and the latter of whom initially entered into an agreement under false pretense, attempting to undermine the investigation and play the role of Team Trump Mole.
These are people who had their chance to give valuable information, but passed on the opportunity and are now getting the book thrown at them. Likely because they can be prosecuted without tainting the other aspects of the investigation or because the information Mueller was seeking from them has since been corroborated elsewhere, meaning people like Roger Stone were no longer needed and could thus be dispensed with.
We haven’t yet seen anyone prosecuted who the Mueller team hadn’t at least tried to cooperate with. We haven’t seen anyone prosecuted who could be considered a “big fish!” That is, someone worth offering a guy like Manafort a deal over. Those prosecutions are still to come.
But before we get to that, think about the types of information we have seen in these trials. Robert Mueller is famous for his so-called “speaking indictments” court filings that reveal a lot of information. Other key facts about the investigation have come to light thanks to court documents or statements made during the trial of these cases.
Up until this point, there have always been two versions of these documents. One confidential “clean” version the judge and those involved get to see, and one highly redacted version the public gets to see. Redactions are necessary for two instances. The first is when National Security is at risk, and the second is when the information redacted pertains to an ongoing investigation.
The investigation is ending.
If you don’t yet understand the paradigm shift created by that small change of status it should become clear very soon. I suspect this is why Michael Cohen has been postponing his testimony to Congress. Remember this bit of news a few weeks ago?
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said in a statement that Cohen's closed-door testimony would be postponed until later this month.
"In the interests of the investigation, Michael Cohen's testimony has been postponed until February 28th," said Schiff, a Democrat from California.
Testifying in front of the House Intelligence Committee would certainly be a whole lot easier if Cohen didn’t have to worry about censoring his remarks on account of any ongoing investigations. I suspect we’ll be seeing a whole lot more open testimony and a whole lot less of those pesky redaction bars as we move forward. And if you doubt the ability to prosecute or indict individuals for crimes discovered during the investigation after the investigation is officially over, look no further than these two reports which state:
I wonder if both the Southern District of New York and the Southern District of West Virginia suddenly have a bunch of new documents to sort through. We might learn more through impending prosecutions of Team Trump than we could have ever hoped to learn through an official and highly redacted Mueller report.
I can imagine just sitting back and watching as case after case gets filed in New York and West Virginia charging higher and higher ranking Trump officials and family members in open court. Soon we could all be reading the mostly unredacted documents filed in each of these cases laying out how everything went down and who was responsible.
The Southern District of New York has already flirted with the idea of ignoring DOJ policy and issuing an indictment of the President. So while the President can certainly fight an indictment issued by a federal prosecutors office, that indictment can still be filed, and it can still “speak” allowing the American people to hear which broken laws the President is trying to claim to be above.
When that happens, I hope Congress is listening.