The former top government lawyer who wrote the rulebook for special counsel investigations countered criticism of Robert Mueller’s investigation on Sunday: “If this is a witch hunt,” said Neal Katyal on NBC’s Meet the Press, “Mueller’s found a coven at this point.” Katyal, who was solicitor general under President Barack Obama, led a Department of Justice group in 1999 to draft new rules governing how a special prosecutor might function, in the event one is required to investigate the conduct of the president or of top administration officials. The framework they came up with is the one that applies to Mueller’s probe of President Trump’s ties with Russia. Katyal pointed to Mueller’s indictment of 37 people so far, with the possibility of more to come, to counter Trump and his allies’ insistence that the probe is a “witch hunt.”
