I’m not a fan of Mueller’s performance in the obstruction probe, but you have to give him his due: He somehow managed to completely escape the special-counsel regulations that were supposed to make him hew to long-established Justice Department practice, and he instead acted as an old-school independent counsel who made up his own rules and wrote an impeachment referral for Congress (and then, today, prodded Congress to act in a public statement). Some of this, I guess, you have to chalk up to Mueller’s bureaucratic savvy, but a lot of it surely has to do with a failure of Justice Department supervision because everyone, especially Rod Rosenstein, was too frightened of the potential political fallout to exercise any real oversight.