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Just 5 weeks after Mueller extended his Trump-Russia grand jury for 6 months—and just days after we learned Mueller has subpoenaed a Cambridge Analytica executive—a certain MSNBC reporter is implying Mueller's report is already done and was submitted to the Department of Justice.
1/ Here's my take on that: someone at Justice who's not in the know—and may be a Trump partisan—is leaking things to this MSNBC reporter to put pressure on Mueller to hurry up. But there's a second possibility, which is that there *is* such report—but it's *not the final report*.
2/ Long, long ago, we had a conversation here on the feed about whether the authorization letter that initiated the Mueller probe permits anything other than a final report. I speculated at the time that perhaps Mueller would want to issue a status report, but might be unable to.
3/ I think it's interesting that we're hearing two MSNBC journalists being so insistent a report is coming soon—with one implying it's already here—right as Main Justice has a new AG coming in. Could this alleged report be Mueller issuing a report to a new AG to protect himself?
4/ I'm merely musing here. I'm not claiming to know this has happened, or even to believe it's happened. But I do find the timing here interesting—as this would be a reasonable time for Mueller to cover his ass by creating a document telling a new AG how much he has accomplished.
5/ Such a document, in the nature of a status report, might help protect Mueller from any action Barr might take to close down his investigation. Having said this, let me be very clear here: I continue to say that the chance of a final report coming anytime soon is virtually nil.
6/ If Mueller needed a justification for such a report, it could come from *many* quarters, including that he previously had no AG he was allowed to issue a status report to, and that this new AG has publicly expressed doubts about Mueller's work that Mueller might want to allay.
7/ Just to play this hypothetical out, if this MSNBC reporter were correct that Justice had a report from Mueller, but had not acknowledged receiving it, that would, I'd admit, be well explained by the report being a status update Justice doesn't have to publicize or acknowledge.
8/ Another possibility: as Congress has already done, Mueller could issue a separate report for each of the discrete categories of investigation that he's permitted. For instance, he could issue a report on non-collusion-related crimes that arose in his collusion investigation.
9/ Certainly, no one believes (say) Prince, Bannon, Kushner, or Trump Jr. *need* to face indictments down the line that are exclusively non-collusion-related. Mueller may be at the point where all future indictments are expected to be in cases that are—overall—collusion-related.
10/ Having said all this, far and away the most likely possibility is that these two NBC reporters are using the same bad sources that were used on the six prior occasions the end of the Mueller investigation was erroneously reported by major media. My money's still on that. /end
