A lawyer who wrote the special counsel regulations says Barr can and should make the Mueller report public

Neal Katyal.
(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

A former Justice Department lawyer who helped write the regulations for special counsel investigations in 1998 and 1999 has added his name to the list of those calling for Attorney General William Barr to make Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, which was handed over to Barr on Friday, available to the public.

Neal Kumar Katyal, who is now a law professor at Georgetown University, wrote in The Washington Post that he and his colleagues drafted regulations for special counsel investigations following independent counsel Ken Starr's investigation into former President Bill Clinton. They wanted to avoid similar investigations in the future which might "produce a lurid document going unnecessarily into detail about someone's intimate conduct."

But he also wrote that the regulations serve as "a floor, not a ceiling" on the amount of transparency that the attorney general can provide to Congress and the public after the special counsel completes an investigation.

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"The canard that some Trump allies are floating, that a public release would violate the special counsel regulations, is false," Katyal wrote. "They require transparency and an 'explanation of each action' at the end of the special counsel investigation, but they don't forbid more transparency on top of that."

Katyal argued that Barr "has all the latitude in the world" to make the Mueller public and that he should, indeed, do so. Read the full article at The Washington Post.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.