And, presumably, hopefully, that would happen after midterms when Democrats could be running the Committee.The leading theory [about what Mueller will do when his investigation is complete] is that Mr. Mueller will write a report for his supervisor at the Justice Department. That could lead to a new fight: Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has suggested that the White House may then invoke executive privilege and order the Justice Department to keep portions of such a report confidential from Congress.
But there is historical precedent for another model. Echoing a move by the Watergate prosecutor in March 1974, the grand jury with which Mr. Mueller has been working could try to send a report about the evidence it has gathered directly to the House Judiciary Committee. And on Friday, seeking to draw more attention to that option, three prominent legal analysts asked a court to lift a veil of secrecy that has long kept that Watergate-era report hidden.
NYT
Specifically, the petition asks a judge to unseal a report that Leon Jaworski, the Watergate prosecutor, used to send Congress the evidence he had gathered about President Richard M. Nixon’s misconduct. Known as the “Road Map,” it was a 55-page index describing evidence and citing underlying testimony and tapes, but without any legal analysis or recommendations about whether Mr. Nixon committed an impeachable offense. While the Judiciary Committee had access to the Road Map, it has remained sealed from public view.
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The petition was filed by Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and the editor in chief of Lawfare, an online publication that specializes in national security legal policy issues; Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration; and Stephen Bates, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, law professor who, as a federal prosecutor working for Ken Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, co-wrote the report to Congress recommending that Mr. Clinton be impeached.
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“Not only does the Road Map carry immense historical significance in understanding the Watergate investigation, it provides a key precedent for assessing the appropriate framework for Special Counsel Mueller to report to Congress any findings of potentially unlawful conduct by President Trump.”
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The option of a grand jury report could also have implications if Mr. Trump were to force the Justice Department to shut down Mr. Mueller’s investigation. It is not clear what would happen if the grand jury members, on their own initiative, were to ask the judge presiding over their panel to transmit to Congress all the evidence they had gathered — without the executive branch’s request or approval.
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