This post was updated at 6:45pm US Eastern time. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election has been delivered to attorney general William Barr, who said he could turn over his account of Mueller’s findings to Congress as soon as this weekend. Mueller was appointed by deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein in May 2017, after Donald Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself. Mueller’s investigation has so far led to 34 people and three companies being indicted; six are Trump associates with direct links to his campaign or his administration, with five sentenced to prison on charges ranging from conspiracy against the United States to money laundering. Twenty-six Russians are among those charged. Mueller reportedly does not recommend any further indictments in the Russia probe, according to multiple outlets. Trump continues to insist he welcomes the report’s public release, adding new flourishes with each mention. In prefacing his latest remarks on the Mueller probe today (March 20), the Associated Press wrote that “Trump went on to mischaracterize the effort” when he told reporters: “It’s sort of interesting that a man out of the blue just writes a report.” Trump went on to say, “I had the greatest electoral victory, one of them, [in] the history of our country. Tremendous success. Tens of millions of voters. And now somebody’s going to write a report, who never got a vote. So we’ll see what the report says. Let’s see if it’s fair.” Not all experts are convinced the special prosecutor’s report will be released in anything near a complete way. Georgetown Law professor Martin Lederman, who served twice in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed that he thinks the Mueller report “probably won’t see the light of day.” The special counsel’s probe is just one of several federal investigations involving Trump, and the others, Lederman maintains, may be more revealing and have more impact. A February poll by the Washington Post found more than 80% of Americans want the entire report to be made public. And as the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote, Barr “probably has no choice but to release nearly all of the report” or face accusations of a coverup. A new poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that six in 10 Americans have “at least some confidence in the fairness of the investigation.” Will the Mueller report be released to the public? A House resolution passed by a vote of 420-0 calls for the Mueller report to be released “in full” to Congress and to the public, along with details of why indictments weren’t pursued against certain individuals—information that is generally not released. The Senate hasn’t voted yet on whether to release it because Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, blocked it from the floor. Graham said he was making a “political point” and wants the FBI to release information about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails at the same time. Trump maintains he is in favor of releasing the entire report even as White House lawyers contemplate how “to claim executive privilege over information drawn from documents and interviews with White House officials,” CNN reported, citing anonymous sources. (Both Democratic and Republican presidents have used the assertion of privilege to limit disclosures to Congress.) Eric Posner, a University of Chicago Law School professor who has written extensively on Mueller, Barr, and the Trump probe, told Quartz he thinks Barr will release the full Mueller report “with some redactions where warranted by privacy or investigative considerations.” “My instinct is that a report of some kind will be released,” said Posner, cautioning that Barr “can do whatever he wants.” Barr promised lawmakers he would “provide as much transparency as I can, consistent with the law.” What will Barr do with the Mueller report? According to the federal code, the report Mueller submitted to Barr, is, per Justice Department rules, considered confidential. Barr will now notify Congress that the special counsel’s probe is over. He is bound to reveal to legislators what, if anything, the department prevented Mueller from pursuing. He also now decides how much, or how little, of the report to release. Here’s what the rules say Barr is required to do: Provide an “explanation” of what Mueller found to the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate judiciary committees Describe any of Mueller’s “proposed actions” that he overruled Barr is permitted to release the report publicly “to the extent that release would comply with applicable legal restrictions.” According to CNN, Barr will submit his own “summary” of the Mueller report to Congress. During his confirmation hearings, Barr told senators he would withhold information that was classified, subject to executive privilege, or was part of grand jury proceedings. Barr also said the Justice Department would not release derogatory information about any so-called “unindicted co-conspirators,” a cohort which could include the president. What does the Mueller report say about Trump? If Mueller has developed evidence of crimes committed by the president but does not seek an indictment against him, we likely won’t hear any officially issued words on specific wrongdoing by Trump as long as he occupies the Oval Office. (This question is far from settled and there is in fact no specific policy preventing a sitting president from being charged.) Justice Department guidelines generally preclude public disclosure of details regarding uncharged conduct and explanations of why certain investigative targets were not indicted. In 2000, the department declared that the “indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.” The department is not expected to put forth an opinion about whether Trump should face criminal charges, according to former federal prosecutors.<doc-sep>There, in Robert Mueller's own words, is the end result of nearly two years of work, 2,800 subpoenas, hundreds of search warrants and countless hours of interviews. There were "multiple offers" of help from "Russian-affiliated individuals" to the Trump campaign, but they never took the bait.<doc-sep>“There are a lot of people out there that have done some very, very evil things, some very bad things, I would say treasonous things against our country,” he said. “I will tell you, I love this country, I love this country as much as I can love anything — my family, my country, my God. But what they did — it was a false narrative, it was a terrible thing. We can never let this happen to another president again . . . Very few people I know could have handled it.”<doc-sep>The details of the final report have yet to be disclosed, but because Attorney General Barr has said there were no instances where he or his predecessors overrode the special counsel's prosecutorial decisions - and no new indictments have been announced - it seems possible that what we have seen with the criminal portion of the probe is what we're going to get.<doc-sep>
Read: What Mueller leaves behind “As described by Barr, at least, Mueller’s report was very focused on criminal-law standards and processes,” said David Kris, a founder of Culper Partners, who served as the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division under former President Barack Obama. “We won’t know for sure if that is the case, and if it is the case, why Mueller confined himself in that way, until we see the full report.” Kris noted, however, that “there is no question that a counterintelligence investigation would have a wider aperture than a strict criminal inquiry as applied here, and would be concerned, for example, with the motivations and any sub-criminal misconduct of the principal actors.” A counterintelligence probe, he added, would ask more than whether the evidence collected is sufficient to obtain a criminal conviction—it could provide necessary information to the public about why the president is making certain policy decisions. “The American people rightly should expect more from their public servants than merely avoiding criminal liability,” Kris said. A spokesman for the House Intelligence Committee said in a statement on Monday that in light of Barr’s memo “and our need to understand Special Counsel Mueller’s areas of inquiry and evidence his office uncovered, we are working in parallel with other Committees to bring in senior officials from the DOJ, FBI and SCO to ensure that our Committee is fully and currently informed about the SCO’s investigation, including all counterintelligence information.” Read: The House’s latest move could be a big threat to Trump’s presidency In May 2017, just after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, the FBI launched a full counterintelligence investigation into the president to determine whether he was acting as a Russian agent. “We were concerned, and we felt like we had credible, articulable facts to indicate that a threat to national security may exist,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe explained to me last month. It’s still not clear what became of that counterintelligence probe after Mueller was appointed, and Barr did not indicate in his four-page summary how far the special counsel pursued it. Read: Andrew McCabe couldn’t believe the things Trump said about Putin Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff at the Defense Department and the CIA under Obama, said he believes Mueller’s “core focus” was to determine whether or not federal criminal laws were violated. “If Mueller interpreted his mandate as a criminal one, the decision to pursue the investigation as such is something he will have to explain to Congress,” Bash said. Mueller’s mandate, given to him by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, empowered him to investigate not only any “coordination” between the campaign and Russia, but any “links” between them as well. Barr’s summary does not describe how Mueller investigated or came to explain the many interactions the campaign had with various Russians during the election.