Orin Kerr‏Verified account @OrinKerr

Kerry Eleveld at Daily Kos: 

Reading the Daily Kos comment threads since the delivery of Robert Mueller's report to the Justice Department, I am seeing a profound sense of dismay from many readers who hoped to see Donald Trump and a cadre of his associates dragged out of the White House in cuffs. That irresistible fantasy has now been put to rest as we await information on Mueller's findings short of criminality. But viewing Mueller's report as the endgame, which was easy to do, was probably never the correct application of his mandate. Indeed, as we watched the investigations spun off from Mueller's work to other jurisdictions such as the Southern District of New York, it became clearer by the month that the special counsel and his report were the starting point for the process of justice, not the end point.

Based on the rules governing past independent counsels such Kenneth Starr during Bill Clinton's presidency, we have tended to view the investigations of those counsels as distinct and conclusive. When they were finished, the investigation was over and the conclusions were resolute. They either violated laws or they didn't, and their ethical transgressions were laid out in written form for Congress to weigh their impeachability. But precisely because the independent investigation into Clinton began in 1994 focused on a real estate deal known as Whitewater and ended with perjury and obstruction of justice accusations lodged against Clinton four years later for his efforts to cover up an unethical but not criminal affair, Congress changed the terms of how independent investigations would be conducted in the future. Attorneys general were given much more control over the process, and the way Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein used that authority appears to have resulted in a process that kept Mueller focused more narrowly on the collusion and obstruction of justice probes related to Trump, while spinning off ancillary findings of potential criminality to other federal prosecutors.

Yeah, I’m trying to sort out the actual timeline here myself. Bill had a sample of his DNA taken (on August 3rd, information that only became publicly known on August 19th) for comparison with the semen stain on The Blue Dress (which was turned over to investigators in late July of 1998) and, obviously, testified before the grand jury in mid-August. The content of his testimony was not, I believe, made public until those tapes, as well as other material, were released during the buildup to the impeachment trial in the Senate that fall and winter. There was considerable debate as to whether or not the affair had happened and what it consisted of until Bill’s admission on August 17th. The Starr report was sent to Congress on September 9th and released to the general public on the 11th and, in the following days, the video of Bill’s testimony was made available and broadcast - on September 21st, as far as I can determine. So, beyond rumors, neither Hillary nor anyone else not either a party to the relationship or someone who had been explicitly told by a person who was had any way of knowing about the blowjobs. If Bill didn’t include that in his confession to Hillary, she’d be totally in the dark. Her comments to Diane Blair seem to suggest that she was under the impression that the indiscretions were limited to making out and heavy petting, given her exclusion of oral sex specifically. But that may well be a misinterpretation. Supposing that Bill said they didn’t have sex (operating under his definition, which did not include oral sex) and Hillary accepted this as truth, if her definition of sex included oral, as the Blair papers indicate, then, whatever her suspicions may have been, as far as she was concerned Bill had told her that there were no blowjobs involved. Did Bill know about these differing parameters and exploit them intentionally? Perhaps. Or did he just play a game of “two truths and a lie” that didn’t pan out? I’ve no idea. Either way, it seems entirely possible that Hillary had little to no idea about the full extent of the sexual relationship until everybody else did. Which… is really, really shitty.