Federal judge concludes that the ongoing Robert Mueller grand jury is the real deal
Last week a surreal situation played out in federal court. Federal prosecutors told a judge that they wanted to continue to keep secret the name of the foreign government-owned company that had been engaged in a subpoena battle with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, because even though Mueller was finished investigating things, Mueller’s grand jury was “continuing robustly.”
Palmer Report pointed out that, because the only purpose of an ongoing grand jury is to bring additional indictments, there were only two possibilities here. The first was that the federal prosecutor who inherited this case was seeking to indict more people in relation to the Mueller probe. The second was that the federal prosecutor was lying to the judge about the grand jury being ongoing, in the hope of preventing the public from ever learning which company Mueller had been targeting.
Today a federal judge gave the prosecutor his way, opting not to publicly unveil the name of the mystery company at this time, according to court filings. This means, in short, that the judge believes the prosecutor’s claim that the Robert Mueller grand jury truly is ongoing in this case. Filings have also revealed that the company is viewed as a witness, not a target. So it’s not that the grand jury would end up indicting the company; it’s that the grand jury would end up indicting whomever these records expose as having committed a crime.
So who’s the target here? That’s still anyone’s guess. All we know about the company is that it’s fully owned by an unidentified foreign government, it’s a financial institution, and it has operations in the United States. And of course the scope of Mueller’s investigation dictates that this matter is directly or indirectly related to Donald Trump. But the real upshot here is that a federal judge just concluded that the ongoing Robert Mueller grand jury is the real deal – and again, a grand jury’s only purpose is to bring indictments.
