Rachel Madcow??? Legal experts??? Good grief. Did you find a law degree floating in your bubble bath?

The following excerpt from the WHSC letter should be shoved up MSNBC's ass.

What prosecutors are supposed to do is complete an investigation and then either ask the grand jury to return and indictment or decline to charge the case. When prosecutors decline to charge, they make the decision not because they have "conclusively determined that no criminal conduct occurred". but rather because they do not believe that the investigated conduct constitutes a crime for which all the elements can be proven to the satisfaction of a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors simply are not in the business of establishing innocence, any more than they are in the business of "exonerating" investigated persons. In the American system of justice, innocence is presumed; there is never any need for prosecutors to "conclusively determine" it. Nor is there any place for such determination. Our country would be a very different (and very dangerous) place if prosecutors applied the SCO standard and citizens were obliged to prove "conclusively . . . that no criminal conduct occurred."

Because they do not belong to our criminal justice vocabulary, the SCO's inverted-proof-standard and "exoneration" statements can be understood only as political statements, issuing from persons (federal prosecutors) who in our system of government are rightly expected never to be political in the performance of their duties. The inverted burden of proof knowlingly embedded in the SCO's conclusion shows that Special Counsel and his staff failed in their duty to act as prosecutors and only as prosecutors.

Second, and equally importantly. In closing its investigation, the SCO had only one job--to "provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by Special Counsel. "28 C.F.R. 600.8(c). Yet the one thing the SCO was obliged to do is the very thing the SCO--intentionally and unapologetically refused to do. The SCO made neither a prosecution decision nor a declination decision on the obstruction question. Instead, it t***smitted a 182-page discussion of raw evidentiary material combined with its own inconclusive observations on the arguable legal significance of the gathered content. As a result, none of the Report's Volume II complied with the obligation imposed by governing regulation to explain the prosecution or declination decisions reached.

The SCO instead produced a prosecutorial curiosity--part "t***h commission" report and part law school exam paper. Far more detailed than the text of any known criminal indictment or declination memorandum, the Report is laden with factual information that has never been subjected to adversarial testing or independent analysis. That information is accompanied by a series of inexplicably inconclusive observations (inexplicable, that is, coming from a prosecutor) concerning possible applications of law to fact. This species of public report has no basis in the relevant regulation and no precedent in the history of special/independent counsel investigations.

An investigation of the President under a regulation that clearly specifies a very particular form of closing documentation is the the place for indulging creative departures from governing law. Under general prosecutorial principles, and under the Special Counsel regulation's specific language, prosecutors are to speak publically through indictments or confidentially in declination memoranda. By way of justifying this departure, it has been suggested that the Report was written with the intent of providing Congress with some kind of "road map" for congressional action. See, e.g. Remarks of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, 4/18/19 (Press Conference) If that was in fact the SCO's intention, it too serves as additional evidence of the SCO's refusal to follow applicable law. Both the language of the regulation an its "legislative" history make plain that the "closing documentation" language was promulgated for the specific purpose of preventing the creation of this sort of final report. Under a constitution of separated powers, inferior Article II officers should not be in the business of creating "road maps" for the purpose of t***smitting them to Article I committees.

So when a new AG is appointed, he is going to have a lot of work coming up to speed with his team, his team is the FBI and department of justice as in the court's prosecution system. Especially when there is so much investigation and issues involving conflicts of interest with the executive branch, there would be no huddling with the white house special counsel and the president...NONE. Any communication between the white house and the AG would be formal and done through and with DOJ staff.

Barr openly and obviously made up his mind that he was not part of the DOJ team investigating Russia and e******n meddling. He did not meet extensively with Mueller to find out what he had and how he got it. He spent minimal times getting information and taking it to the white house to work out strategies for protecting the president, who he had already declared could not be prosecuted by the DOJ for anything. He's obviously taking the position that even though the DOJ or AG cannot prosecute the president, congress isn't going to go after him for anything either.

Barr is part of obstructing the legal and constitutional oversight congress is responsible for doing. They have every right to go where Mueller pointed in his report. They have every right to talk to Mueller and McGahn, they have every right to have access to the unredacted report, including actually the dozen more prosecutions passed on to other prosecutors....

and most importantly, if Barr isn't cooperating as an arm of the law as far as going after crimes, Mueller can, and there is no way the DOJ can stop him from doing it. He knows what the crimes are and the evidence proving them is. Months ago before congress took over Schiff had said that if the DOJ and white house obstructed the investigation by firing Mueller they intended to hire him as their counsel.