Here’s the thing about this new claim that Robert Mueller won’t mention Donald Trump in his report
As we get ever closer to the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report about Donald Trump, we’ve seen some increasingly surreal attempts by the media to scare us into staying tuned in. One of the most popular yet baseless assertions has been that Mueller’s report will somehow never become public. Now there’s a new scary media narrative in play: Mueller’s report won’t even be about Donald Trump.
As absurd as this sounds, it’s coming from a major news outlet, ABC News. It’s claiming that “sources familiar with the investigation believe there are no more indictments coming from the special counsel.” It’s also referring back to Rod Rosenstein’s earlier remark that the Mueller report won’t contain disparaging information about anyone who’s not being criminally charged. Put these two things together, and ABC has concluded that the report will only be about the people who have already been charged. Uh, wait a minute here.
There are two key flaws in this logic. First, we have no way of knowing whether ABC’s “sources familiar with the investigation” are actually on Robert Mueller’s team. For all we know, these sources could be Trump-loyal personnel at the DOJ who are trying to help Donald Trump’s case by spinning misinformation. In hindsight, these same kinds of “sources” appear to have been behind the false narrative that Mueller’s report would be done last month, and with the false narrative that Rosenstein was going to have resigned by now. Also, Mueller and his team don’t leak these kinds of things. Even if they did, it’s unclear why they would only “believe” there are no more indictments coming, when they’re the ones who have made those decisions one way or the other.
The second flaw in ABC’s logic might be the more egregious one. Even if Robert Mueller and his office aren’t going to indict anyone else, this could simply mean that they’re planning to have various permanent federal prosecutors handle any upcoming indictments around the same time Mueller issues his report. This isn’t merely theoretical; we’ve already seen Mueller hand the Michael Cohen cases and other cases off to SDNY and other U.S. Attorney’s offices.
The bottom line: this seems like a whole lot of nonsense. That said, this flawed logic may unwittingly reveal something crucial. If Mueller sticks to Rosenstein’s edict that the report about Donald Trump’s crimes can only disparage people who are being criminally charged, wouldn’t that mean that Mueller is planning to have someone criminally charge Trump around the time of this report?
