Monday at The Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, D.C., Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed special counsel Robert Mueller investigation’s requirements to report to Attorney General Bill Barr.
Rosenstein said, “The special counsel regulation actually was put together in a very thoughtful way. And the goal of special counsel regulation was to ensure that when the attorney general or acting attorney general believed it was appropriate, that we would establish a process whereby there would be some additional independence, structural independence really comes in, in the fact that if a special counsel, if the special counsel proposes to take an action and is overruled by the attorney general, or the acting attorney general, we are required to report that to the Congress. That’s the structural independence provided in the statute. The special counsel is a subordinate employee who reports to the attorney general or the acting attorney general and who complies with department policies, including requirement to pursue — to obtain approval for certain actions just like an acting United States attorney, for example, would need to.”
He added, “I can’t answer your question because that’s going to be a decision the attorney general makes with what to do with whatever information is provided to him. I can tell you I think the regulation was appropriately written to ensure that we can be confident that the investigation was conducted in an independent way and that if that special prosecutor believed something should be done and we prohibited him from doing it, there would be a report about that to Congress at the end. Beyond that, I think Attorney General Barr is going to make the right decision. We can trust him to do that. He has a lot of experience to do that. Bill Barr when he was attorney general in the first go-round in the course of his 14 months or so, he appointed a couple of special counsels in that era, that were not subject to this regulation obviously, but I think we can count on him to do the right thing.”
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