It’s great that the Mueller probe appears to be almost leak free. At least in theory it’s great. It’s not great if you want to understand the progress of the investigation or what is likely to come of it – something we have an understandable, even pressing interest in. We’re reduced to making inferences based on the slivers of information which emerge from the probe. Here Tierney Sneed explains why the fact that Mueller got a search warrant to get information from Facebook actually tells us some key information about the progress of the probe because of what Mueller’s lawyers had to prove to a judge to get that warrant. Read this piece. It’s important context to understand where things are.
This is also why we need at least a robust congressional investigation and probably an independent commission to investigate the entirety of the election.
People who committed crimes should be punished. But that’s not the highest priority in this case. The highest priority is to find out what happened and bring that information before the public. The fundamental questions are political rather than legal. In theory, a criminal probe can find all sorts of information that the public needs to know but not any crimes. In that case, the investigation closes and everything remains secret.
In practice, even if there are big bad acts which don’t violate statutes there are likely other laws that were violated in the process of committed those bad acts. Hypothetically, maybe there was collusion. But it happened in a way that didn’t violate specific statutes. In that case, Mueller would probably have various campaign finance violations, possibly money laundering and other crimes that he could prosecute. He can bring indictments on the basis of those crimes.
The big picture is that getting to the bottom of what happened and making those findings public is the highest priority. A criminal probe is not the best way to do that.
