“I think part of it was they had their initial guidelines,” Mathai said. The instructors told students that they were aware their case had implications for the future but that they felt their foremost obligation was to faithfully execute their duties in the present, and for department policy and norms to light their way. In its absence, the special counsel regulations took its place. The independent counsel statute expired in 1999. The Clinton investigation was conducted under an independent counsel, which was authorized under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 and had more independent authority than today’s special counsel does. Mathai noted that President Bill Clinton, who was investigated related to sexual impropriety in the Oval Office, perjured himself while honoring a subpoena to appear before a grand jury, leading to his impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice - a cautionary tale for any president. Should a special counsel’s office, appointed to the task by the Department of Justice and not elected, reach judgments about whether a democratically elected president committed a crime? Such discussions led them to think about the political implications of every move. The instructors asked the students what they thought the right course of action would have been. “And nobody was sure how helpful that testimony would have even been.”Īndrew Goldstein, Aaron Zebley ’96, Robert Mueller ’73 and Jim Quarles were the senior leaders of the special counsel investigation who shared their knowledge with students. “It would have been heavily litigated,” White said, potentially wasting time and resources. But the lawyers suspected that would end up in the courts and take many months to resolve. To move Trump any further would require a legal order to appear. The president had submitted written responses to questions through his attorneys, but the investigative team found them largely unenlightening, they told the class. The instructors were frank about the challenges they faced in the wrangling to get President Donald Trump to speak in person and on the record. “Oh, that was a fun day in class,” student Madison White said about the subpoena discussion. The attorneys discussed such high-profile decisions as what to do after the attorney general released a letter to Congress interpreting their report’s findings and whether to subpoena the sitting president. And Goldstein, a former federal prosecutor focused on public corruption cases, was senior assistant special counsel. Quarles, with his previous experience as a prosecutor in the Watergate scandal, was senior counsel to Mueller. Zebley, a former FBI agent and federal prosecutor, served as deputy special counsel to the investigation. The instructors for The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel were Aaron Zebley ’96, Jim Quarles and Andrew Goldstein, with Mueller attending all sessions and addressing the class at times. “They were being pretty vulnerable in going through their thought process,” said Robert Mathai, who was among the 16 students lucky enough to be chosen by lottery to take the course, offered in September and October. The attorneys, including former FBI Director Robert Mueller ’73 as a guest lecturer, invited students to judge their work and what they might have done better. Recently, the leaders of the historic probe taught a short course for a select group of third-year University of Virginia law students, walking them through the decision points of their investigation. The investigation resulted in almost three dozen people being indicted or entering guilty pleas, and culminated in the 448-page Mueller report. Despite the largely unprecedented nature of the work, armchair quarterbacks from left, right and center gave their take. It seemed that everyone had an opinion about the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
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