Dershowitz doesn’t understand that Mueller had a special charge because he was a special counsel
(Posted to Twitter on March 23)
I’ve said all along that Mueller was an investigator, not (principally or in the first instance) a prosecutor. So I think @AlanDersh is just wrong here. 1/10
Mueller’s interest, like Sergeant Joe Friday’s in the old TV show ‘Dragnet,” was to find “Just the facts, ma’am.” And boy, did Mueller find a lot of facts.
40 FBI agents
2800 subpoenas
500 search warrants
230 orders for communication records
Interviewed 500 witnesses 2/10
Congress and the people need to see that underlying evidence. 3/10
The problem is not that Mueller declined to make “traditional prosecutorial judgments,” because Rosenstein’s authorization order didn’t tell him to make those judgments himself. (The Department was to make them after it got his findings.) 4/10
The problem is that we haven’t seen the underlying evidence gathered by Mueller for either collusion or obstruction of justice. 5/10
As for collusion: All we know at this point is that Mueller seems to have been quite confident in his opinion that there was no evidence SHOWING BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT IN A COURT OF LAW that Trump or his campaign conspired with the Russians to interfere in the election. 6/10
There is no reason to doubt Mueller on this point, but note that this is not the same thing as asserting there is no evidence for collusion that should be of concern to Congress or the electorate. 7/10
Trump’s claim of exoneration on the matter of obstruction of justice is even weaker, because on this point, Mueller (it is clear) wasn’t even sure that the evidence WASN’T SUFFICIENT TO PROVE BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT IN A COURT OF LAW that Trump obstructed justice. 8/10
mentions sailed way off course here b/c he fails to see that Rosenstein intended Mueller’s investigation to be a counterintelligence investigation. Ergo his report should be a counterintelligence report.
Let’s see if it is! Let’s see the report and all the evidence. 9/10
Dershowitz is absolutely right that this wouldn’t be appropriate for a typical, run-of-the mill prosecutorial investigation. But that’s not what this was. At any rate, it SHOULD have been much more than that. 10/10
PS/ I don’t think I’m contradicting myself at tweet #6. Barr’s summary today only gave us snippets (not even full sentences) from the Report. So we don’t know whether Mueller actually rendered a verdict about even this, or simply left it to Barr as an inference.
