Former special counsel Robert Mueller and three attorneys who worked in his office will regale students at the University of Virginia School of Law with stories of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the law school announced Wednesday.
Mueller will lead “at least one class,” a press release read, though the six-session fall course, “The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel,” will be primarily taught by Aaron Zebley, Jim Quarles and Andrew Goldstein, three high-ranking attorneys in Mueller’s special counsel office.
“The course will focus on a key set of decisions made during the special counsel’s investigation,” the law school said. “Instructors will talk about the legal and practical context for those decisions in a discussion format, and walk through the challenges and trade-offs when making decisions in a high-profile investigation.”
The class will be structured chronologically, starting with the beginning of the investigation and focusing, among other things, “on navigating the relationship with the Justice Department and Congress” and “presidential accountability and the role of special counsel in that accountability.”
The former special counsel team should have a lot to say on those points: A recently unredacted opinion showed a federal judge’s scorn for former Attorney General Bill Barr’s role preempting the release of the Mueller report.
In 2019, Barr released a four-page letter to Congress “summarizing” the encyclopedic report’s conclusions nearly a month before the report was made public — a “summary” that didn’t actually reflect the report’s crucial findings.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who also oversaw Roger Stone’s trial and sentencing, wrote that Barr’s advisers were working behind the scenes on “getting a jump on public relations.”
“I look forward to engaging with the students this fall,” Mueller said in the law school’s press release.
Tierney Sneed contributed reporting.
