Bob Mueller's job now is just to go away

The last thing the world needs is more of Robert Mueller's commentary, but Congress is determined to have him hold forth at a public hearing.

It isn't as though we don't already have the special counsel's version of events. He mustered enormous investigative resources and took two years to write a 400-page report that is available to the public and presumably carefully written (although not necessarily carefully thought through).

That should be enough for Mueller to stand on — and enough for Congress to make a decision to -- impeach or not impeach, or otherwise dispose of the matter as it sees fit. Instead, Mueller is going to be asked to expand on his already expansive report that not only blew through Justice Department regulations but inverted the longstanding burden of proof in the Anglo American legal tradition.

As a prosecutor, Mueller's sole job was to decide whether or not the president was guilty of a crime. He declined to do this, choosing ­instead to write a nearly 200-page volume on obstruction cataloguing what he found in the course of not making the only decision he was supposed to make.

The relevant regulations say at the conclusion of the special counsel's work he or she "shall provide the attorney general with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the special counsel."

On obstruction, Mueller reached no such decision, and he didn't write a confidential report, either — his report was clearly meant for public consumption. Besides that, he's a sticker for the rules.

"Mueller's action," Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School writes at Lawfare, "seems inconsistent with what the regulations tried to accomplish, which was to prevent extra-prosecutorial editorializing." Worse, as Trump's special counsel, Emmet Flood, set out in an excoriating letter, by stipulating that the evidence prevented him "from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred," Mueller stood the presumption of innocence on its head.

By Mueller's standard, the prosecutor doesn't have to prove guilt, the target has to prove innocence. If the target doesn't, he will be disparaged in a quasi-indictment spelling out why he wasn't exonerated.

If anyone not named Donald J. Trump were subjected to this new prosecutorial standard, it would occasion widespread comment and — one hopes — consternation.

There is, no doubt, public value in Mueller's report, but he wasn't supposed to be a free-floating ombudsman or truth commission. If Congress wanted to create one of those and charge it with running down every lead related to Trump's alleged obstruction, it could have. Under the regulations, though, the special counsel is only "to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions of any United States attorney."

Now, Congress wants Mueller to compound the offense by speaking publicly. It doesn't want facts from him. They are already in the report. It wants opinions and sound bites, especially any embarrassing to the president. Congress wants him to spend a couple of high-profile hours further "not exonerating" the president.

If Mueller had a proper understanding of his role, he would decline the invitation and perhaps write a letter giving his version of events regarding his interactions with Attorney General William Barr, which became such a flashpoint last week.

Fact is, Mueller and Congress have a symbiotic relationship. For two years, Mueller was acting as, in effect, the lead counsel for an impeachment inquiry, bizarrely housed within the executive branch, while Congress wants to use his moral authority as a crutch at a time when it is vulnerable to charges of partisan overreaching.

This, too, is not supposed to be how the system works. But we are long beyond anyone caring. For a swath of the political world and much of the media, all that matters is that Mueller "not exonerate" Trump, and the more, the better, in whatever format or forum.

Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

(COMMENT, BELOW)