últimas notícias

It’s been three days since Attorney General William Barr sent Congress a four-page summary of the “principal conclusions” of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Trump-Russia investigation. That’s not a long time, but it has been long enough for a passionate debate to arise between partisans who have not seen the report, played out for a public that has not seen the report, either. Uninformed arguments are everywhere.

The Mueller report should have been prepared from the very beginning with public release in mind, and then made public the moment its completion was announced.

Without the report, it is impossible for anyone to make an informed argument about anything. Yes, Barr quoted two brief bits from the Mueller report that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities” and “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.” Those are clear statements that Mueller does not allege that President Trump or his circle conspired or coordinated with Russia or that conspiracy or coordination took place at all. That alone should be enough to put an end to two years of ugly and unfounded accusations directed at the president.

But it’s not enough to really understand what Mueller found and how he interpreted the evidence. Still, it’s more than Barr provided on the question of obstruction of justice. Barr wrote that the Mueller report “sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.” Barr included a fragment of a sentence from the report that said, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

You can guarantee that when the report is finally made public, there will be those who argue that it offers dead solid proof that Trump obstructed justice and those who argue that it offers dead solid proof that he did not obstruct justice. The point is, no one can have an informed argument as long as the report remains finished but unreleased.

[Related: Dem congressman contradicts Mueller report, says he has personally seen evidence of Russian collusion]

Laws and regulations regarding special investigative reports have changed over the years. The last report that matched the Mueller investigation in both importance and intensity of public interest was independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report on the Lewinsky matter, which served as the basis for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998. That report was prepared under the old independent counsel law, which has since expired and been replaced by the Justice Department’s special counsel guidelines that have been in place during the Mueller investigation.

Although there are many differences between the cases, Mueller faces one major obstacle that Starr faced, and that is how to handle grand jury information included in the report. The law forbids public release of such information. It also forbids release of grand jury information to Congress.

But there is perfectly legitimate way around the law, and that is to seek a court order authorizing release of the material. That is what Starr did when he sent the Lewinsky report, which included grand jury information, to Congress. Starr received court approval and sent the report. That is what Mueller could have done, only this time releasing the report to the public instead of to Congress. A few days ago, former Whitewater prosecutor Sol Wisenberg outlined the path Mueller could take to ensure quick release of the report:

It would have been a good idea, but that is not what happened.

Perhaps Mueller tried to do that, in secret, and ran into some sort of problem. We don’t know. All we know is that the report’s completion was announced, the four-page Barr summary was released, and that’s it. Now, the Justice Department says some sort of cleared for public consumption version of the report will be released in “weeks, not months.”

Just for comparison: Starr delivered his report to Congress on Wednesday, Sept. 9. On Friday the 11th, the House voted to release the 445-page to the public. Within hours, millions were reading it on the internet. Even during the two days when the report was not public, press reports were filled with descriptions of it from members of Congress. And then the public could make its own decision.

That is what should have happened with Mueller.

Now, it is true that Mueller faced one problem Starr did not, and that is that the Trump-Russia investigation, unlike the Lewinsky affair, involved a significant amount of classified information. It can’t just be published in a report. What to do about that? First, Mueller could have written the report to minimize the amount of classified material included. Second, he could have made minimal redactions to cover those parts and quickly released the report. Third, on the probability that some of the classified material was needlessly classified, he could have sought to declassify those parts. (President Trump might well have been happy to cooperate and declassify other Trump-Russia documents, like the full Carter Page FISA warrant applications, in the process.)

Also, it’s likely that much, if not most, of the classified material in the Mueller report would be in the sections dealing with Mueller’s indictment of Russians and Russian businesses for their campaign disinformation campaign and hacking and distribution of Democratic emails. That part of Mueller’s investigation is almost universally accepted and has thus caused the least public debate and controversy. Mueller could redact parts of that with little, if any, protest.

In any event, today the Mueller report sits at the Justice Department, where it will apparently be worked on for weeks before it will be released. And there is no guarantee that it will be released at all. Perhaps Barr will write a more extensive summary of the report and release that. The only thing that is certain is that the public is not being well served by keeping the report under wraps.