Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is leaving the Justice Department soon, believes new Attorney General William Barr can be trusted with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's findings.
“I think Attorney General Barr is going to make the right decision,” Rosenstein said when asked about Mueller’s final report during an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
“We can trust him to do that. He has a lot of experience with this,” Rosenstein said, noting that Barr appointed special counsels during his first stint as attorney general, in the George H.W. Bush administration. “I think we can count on him to do the right thing.”
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Rosenstein, who first appointed Mueller as special counsel and oversaw the investigation for well upward of a year, was asked by moderator Suzanne Spaulding on Monday to explain what the Justice Department’s process is in terms of handling the end of Mueller’s investigation and his final report.
Rosenstein declined to directly answer the question, but asserted that the 1999 regulations governing Mueller’s appointment were put together “in a very thoughtful way.” He noted that the regulations state that the special counsel is accountable to the Department of Justice but also offer the special counsel the independence and authority of a U.S. attorney.
“We’re going to comply with those rules,” Rosenstein said. “The special counsel is a subordinate employee who reports to the attorney general or the acting attorney general.”
He went on to argue that the public should be “confident” the investigation will be conducted independently.
“I can’t answer your question because that’s going to be a question that the attorney general makes as to what to do with whatever information is provided to him,” Rosenstein told Spaulding. “But I can tell you that 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.”
Rosenstein, however, did not seem to be supportive of Barr releasing information about uncharged individuals.
... Rosenstein conceded there “may be legitimate reasons for making exceptions,” but he felt the Justice Department generally should be sensitive “to the rights of uncharged people.”
“There’s a knee-jerk reaction to suggest that we should be transparent about what we do in government, but there are a lot of reasons not to be transparent about what we do in government,” Rosenstein said. “Just because the government collects information doesn’t mean that information is accurate, and it can be really misleading if you’re overly transparent about information that the government collects, so I think we do need to be really cautious about that.”
Rosenstein says public should trust Barr on Mueller report (The Hill)