Trump can get rid of Mueller -- but he can't stop a sitting Grand Jury. So an Obama-appointed judge
named Beryl Howell may hold the future of the country in her hands.
If Trump appointed someone to replace Rosenstein who then fired Mueller, there is still someone who could continue the investigation: the judge in charge of the Grand Jury that is already hearing evidence.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/14/trump-can-fire-mueller-but-not-a-grand-jury-216975
Under the federal rules of criminal procedure, a grand jury is empaneled by a judge and can be discharged only by that judge (or another judge, in case the empaneling judge is removed from the case or is no longer on the bench). Ordinarily, a judge’s decision to discharge a grand jury is ministerial, because the prosecutor defines the grand jury’s “scope of work” – the prosecutor asks the grand jury to issue indictments on particular charges, and the grand jury either does so or doesn’t (though it almost always does, in run-of-the-mill cases). When the grand jury has decided on the charges proposed by the prosecutor, the judge discharges the grand jury.
But that is just ordinary practice, and the events we are contemplating are not ordinary. Last August, Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia empaneled a grand jury to hear evidence from the special counsel. That grand jury would not automatically terminate if Mueller and his team were fired. Legally, the individual U.S. citizens currently hearing evidence from Mueller’s investigation will remain a duly constituted grand jury until Howell discharges them. And Trump does not have the power to order Howell to do so.
In the event Mueller and his team were to be fired, Howell will have a big decision to make.
If she permits the grand jury to continue, she will hardly be acting without precedent. When America’s founders wrote the Constitution, and for 150 years thereafter, it was not uncommon for so-called runaway grand juries to go beyond the prosecutor’s “instructions” in issuing indictments. These runaway grand juries became virtually extinct after the 1930s, when a new law required a prosecutor’s signature before an indictment can be issued.
A runaway jury in the modern era, in a case with these stakes, would put us in uncharted territory. But again: Nothing in the Constitution, or in any statute or rule, would prevent that grand jury from continuing to work or from issuing a report detailing its findings. The requirement that indictments bear a prosecutor’s signature would prevent the grand jury from issuing indictments on its own – but it would be legally possible, albeit wholly unorthodox, for a federal prosecutor other than Mueller (say, any of the nation’s 93 United States attorneys, whether motivated by conscience or ambition) to sign and file an indictment prepared by Howell’s grand jury.
= new reply since forum marked as read
