Read: What Mueller leaves behind

Little attention has been paid, at least in public discussion, to the parsimonious provisions of the regulations governing special counsels. Yet those regulations have been on the books for two decades, without any material change. They should have been carefully analyzed long before now, because they were triggered to much public fanfare in May 2017 by Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s appointment of Mueller to serve—and this is crucial—as a special counsel within the Department of Justice.

Under the regulations that governed his appointment and now guide his final acts, Mueller is to provide a confidential report to one person only: the attorney general. The regulations, which were promulgated during the final months of the Clinton administration, do not contemplate any sort of report sent directly from the special counsel to Congress or the general public. To the contrary, the regulations call upon the attorney general, William Barr, to receive the confidential report and then do two things: First, to notify Congress of the investigation’s completion and, second, to provide an explanation for certain specifically enumerated actions. There is no requirement for a Barr-edited version of the Mueller report.

In short, there may be no Mueller report at all, save for the confidential document that lands on Barr’s desk. And these same regulations do not require the attorney general to simply pass along a confidential report that may very well contain unflattering information about one or more individuals. Including the president.

The fact that this prosecutor, unlike other prosecutors, cannot indict if he finds an indictable offense may seem to put pressure on the attorney general to share the report with Congress, which can remedy presidential misconduct through impeachment.

Read: The attorney general’s letter confirming that Mueller’s investigation is over

But this unusual situation does not somehow work a repeal of well-established traditions of confidentiality. If the House wants to consider impeachment, it needs to do its own work. It would be odd in the extreme to ask, in effect, the executive branch to become a tool of the legislative branch in a death-struggle with the only individual identified in the Constitution as the possessor and wielder of executive power: the president. That was the old way, under the old statute. Congress did away with that approach, and wisely so.

The regulations now governing Mueller were meant to restore the traditions of the Department of Justice, which were broken when Congress enacted the special-prosecutor (or, later, independent-counsel) provisions of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. Under that regime, reports became the warp and woof of the independent counsel’s work. Most provocatively, the statute required an independent counsel to refer matters to the House of Representatives for possible impeachment when a surprisingly low threshold of evidence was in hand—“substantial and credible information that an impeachable offense may have been committed.” I followed that requirement when I produced the so-called Starr Report, which then took on a controversial life of its own in the House in the dramatic months of 1998.