Special counsel Robert Mueller will not be recommending any further indictments in his Russia investigation, a senior Justice Department official said today.
The revelation answered one of the major questions that remained about Mueller’s probe into Russian election meddling, which has already indicted 34 people, including several individuals in President Trump’s inner circle.
Dozens of sealed indictments had been filed in the Washington, D.C., federal court during the two year’s Muller has been at work, leading some to speculate that others may have been pulled into the case, including Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, and Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser and the president’s son-in-law.
“Let’s be specific,” CNN legal expert Jeffrey Toobin said. “This is really good news for a lot of people around Donald Trump. Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, Jerome Corsi, the writer who had a draft indictment presented to him by Mueller’s office and they decided not to go forward with this. Let’s be fair here. There has been a lot of suspicion around certain people. And a lot of negative things have been said and imputation of criminal activity.”
“Mueller has said, I am not proceeding. There is no better news to receive than you are not being indicted by the United States government,” he said.
While the large group of unindicted people who have been tangled up in the Russia probe can breathe a sigh of relief, they can’t exhale completely.
Federal prosecutors, state investigators and congressional committees are all conducting probes into potential crimes that have spun out of Mueller’s work, or that are tied to the president’s business dealings, campaign and inaugural committee’s fundraising efforts.
The Southern District of New York for instance has numerous active probes that some legal experts say pose an even greater legal challenge to the president and his inner circle than the Mueller probe.