Swiftly closes up shop

Mueller swiftly closes up shop

It’s a move that could create tensions between DOJ and Democrats as lawmakers seek more information.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN

The docket sheet hanging outside a federal courtroom on Wednesday morning still listed Robert Mueller’s prosecutors. But they were nowhere to be found at the hearing.

Welcome to the post-Mueller world.

In a matter of days the special counsel has downshifted from investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election to the managerial tasks involved in packing up papers, disbanding staff and handing off cases. Almost everything left to argue in court — like Wednesday’s hearing involving a mysterious foreign company fighting a Mueller subpoena — has been given to career prosecutors in permanent offices.

It’s all happened in a quick burst in the days since Attorney General William Barr on Friday declared an end to Mueller’s work. He then issued a four-page summary declaring no conspiracy had been found between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, but that Mueller hadn’t come to a conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice.

The memo left lawmakers clamoring for more information about exactly what Mueller did — and didn’t — find during his two-year-long probe. But Mueller and his team won’t be sticking around to answer those questions. While Mueller was in his D.C. office on Wednesday, he’ll be a private citizen again in a matter of days, as will several of his top prosecutors who, like the special counsel, left their well-paying jobs at white shoe law firms nearly two years ago to come work on the Russia investigation.

In their stead, the deputy attorney general’s office “in consultation” with Barr’s team — Mueller’s bosses during his tenure — will handle any remaining responsibilities, including briefing Justice Department colleagues and members of Congress, according to Peter Carr, a special counsel spokesman.

It’s a rapid shift that could create tensions between the department and lawmakers as they seek more information. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared on Sunday that Barr, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, was “not in a position to make objective determinations about the report.” And the House Judiciary Committee Chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), emerged frustrated from a Wednesday phone meeting with Barr, proclaiming that he was “very disturbed” that the attorney general would not commit to turning over Mueller’s entire report to Congress. Nadler added that Barr intended to testify before his committee “reasonably soon” and that the panel might want Mueller to appear as the main witness in a public hearing after that.

The House Intelligence Committee chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), even suggested that his committee would try to go around Barr on some issues. His staff had already “initiated discussions with the intelligence community,” Schiff noted, to try to learn about elements not mentioned in Barr’s memo, like the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into whether Trump or anyone on his team was compromised by Russia.

Still, it’s too soon to say whether Mueller’s hand-off of all duties — including congressional briefings — should be cause for concern, said Randall Samborn, a former senior Justice Department aide and spokesman for the George W. Bush-era special counsel investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

“I think we have to wait to see if DOJ officials going forward are able to preserve its long tradition of placing the apolitical integrity of law enforcement above politics,” Samborn said.

“Ultimately,” he added, “there is always concern about the erosion of respect for and confidence in the rule of law, but that seems imperiled on many fronts, including … whether senior DOJ officials are able to adequately take the reins from a departed special counsel.”

Mueller’s files will be kept in accordance with the Justice Department’s record retention rules, Carr said, though he declined to elaborate further about what those requirements entail.

The shuttering of Mueller’s team comes as the key lawmakers get their first briefings from Barr about the special counsel’s efforts. Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters after a Tuesday night meeting with Barr that the attorney general planned to release “everything that doesn’t compromise national security or violate the law.” Nadler had a different interpretation after his chat with the attorney general.

“He wouldn’t commit to” giving Congress Mueller’s entire report, Nadler told reporters in the Capitol.

Meanwhile, some remaining Mueller-related activity will continue unabated.

Although the special counsel’s prosecutors weren’t in the courtroom on Wednesday — where a judge heard arguments over a media-led push to unseal the name of the foreign state-owned firm fighting Mueller — one of the Justice Department prosecutors taking over the case confirmed that the grand jury Mueller used to investigate the 2016 election was “continuing robustly.” The revelation indicated that significant developments could still occur in the Mueller-affiliated cases not yet fully settled, legal experts said.

And Rudy Giuliani isn’t severing himself from representing Trump just yet. The former New York mayor, who has been working for Trump on a pro bono basis since last April, told POLITICO he planned to be the president’s personal lawyer “for a while.”

But he’ll be dealing with a whole new slate of lawyers for any lingering Mueller-related work.

On Monday, a day after Barr released his summary report of the special counsel’s work, seven special counsel prosecutors handed off their case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his deputy Rick Gates and their longtime associate in the Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik.

At least four assistant U.S. attorneys from the D.C. office will deal with any residual issues involving the case, which has resulted in Manafort serving a 7.5-year prison sentence for a series of financial fraud, obstruction and conspiracy charges. Gates is cooperating with authorities in exchange for a recommendation of a more lenient penalty, while Kilimnik has been charged with witness tampering but remains out of reach of U.S. prosecution while living in Moscow.

Federal prosecutors in D.C. are also expected to take over Mueller’s cases against both Roger Stone and Concord Management and Consulting, the Russian-based company led by a close associate of President Vladimir Putin that has hired American lawyers to fight back on charges it helped orchestrate the massive online campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

The change in command is fresh enough that the special counsel’s lawyers remain listed on the docket in both cases.

“That does seem very swift,” said John Q. Barrett, a former associate counsel who worked under independent counsel Lawrence Walsh during the Reagan-era investigation into secret U.S. arms sales to Iran.

Still, he noted that the workload involved in closing up Mueller’s shop shouldn’t be all that challenging when considering that the special counsel has always been an internal office inside the Justice Department. “So it’s more like the question of how fast an assistant U.S. attorney team closes an investigation and moves on to new work or new [non-prosecutorial] jobs,” Barrett said.

Mueller’s lawyers aren’t totally done elsewhere, either. Michael Dreeben, the deputy solicitor general and one of the most experienced lawyers on the special counsel’s team, filed a motion Wednesday opposing The Washington Post’s request for a two-week extension to address a lawsuit seeking the release of filings and transcripts in the Manafort case.

But in other venues, former Mueller members are starting to surface. David Archey, who through early March served as the lead senior FBI agent on detail to the special counsel, helped roll out the announcement Wednesday that James Fields, the neo-Nazi sympathizer who struck and killed a woman during a white nationalist rally in Virginia in 2017, had pleaded guilty to 29 federal hate crimes.

Back in the D.C. courthouse on Wednesday, Theodore Boutrous, the lead attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the open-government group fighting to unseal the name of the mystery company that for months has defied a Mueller subpoena, mused about what the prompt shuttering of the special counsel’s office might mean for those hoping to learn more about the intensely scrutinized probe.

“It makes our argument stronger for maximum disclosure,” he said.