Andrew Kent was quoted in a Washington Post article about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation.
It’s now being widely reported that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is set to wrap up his investigation and deliver a report to Attorney General William Barr as soon as next week. Which has raised a big question: How much will Barr disclose about Mueller’s findings to Congress?
The emerging “savvy” consensus is that we shouldn’t expect too much. As The Post reports here and here, Justice Department regulations don’t require maximal disclosure, and Barr has been noncommittal, citing (in The Post’s words) Justice Department “practices that insist on saying little or nothing about conduct that does not lead to criminal charges.”
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It’s true that DOJ regulations governing the special counsel’s work do not require maximal disclosure. They direct him to “provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining” his “prosecution or declination decisions,” upon the “conclusion” of his work.The regulations then instruct the attorney general to provide the bipartisan leaders of the judiciary committees in both chambers with “an explanation” of the “conclusion of the Special Counsel’s investigation.”
This gives Barr great discretion to decide how much information from Mueller’s findings to transmit to Congress. But as Andrew Kent, a law professor at Fordham University, points out in an interview, there’s no reason to read this as precluding maximal disclosure.
“The language is not limiting in any way,” Kent told me. “An attorney general who wanted to could easily read this to allow a broad and inclusive report.”