Building on UVA Law Class, Mueller Report Book Will Benefit Karsh Center

The Mueller report inspired a class at the University of Virginia School of Law — and now the course’s instructors have written a book about the investigation.

The proceeds from “Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation,” by Aaron Zebley ’96, James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein, will benefit the Law School’s Karsh Center for Law and Democracy. The trio have taught the course, The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel, which is sponsored by the Karsh Center, for the past three years at the Law School.

The Karsh Center, directed by Professors Bertrall Ross and Micah Schwartzman ’05, was founded in 2018 to promote civil discourse, civic engagement, ethics and integrity in public office, and respect for the rule of law.

From 2017 to 2019, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III ’73 and a team of investigators and prosecutors conducted a wide-ranging probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, building cases that would result in federal indictments of more than 30 defendants.

Mueller, who served as FBI director from 2001 to 2013 and is a recipient of the 2013 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law, led the investigation as special counsel, while Zebley served as deputy special counsel. Quarles was senior counsel to Mueller, and Goldstein was senior assistant special counsel.

Both Mueller and Zebley serve as Karsh Distinguished Fellows at the Law School. Though Mueller is not an instructor, he has spoken at several classes and attended some of the other sessions. The course examines a key set of decisions made during the special counsel’s investigation. Instructors talk about the legal and practical context for those decisions in a discussion format and walk through the challenges and trade-offs when making choices in a high-profile investigation.

After teaching students about the investigation, the instructors were ready to share their recollections with the public.

“We had been thinking about lessons learned from the counsel’s office for several years — that is the principal focus of our course at UVA,” the trio said in joint written comments. “We thought it particularly important to write a book about those issues this year because there is an election coming and Russian election interference continues to this day, and the topic of presidential accountability has special relevance with the recent Supreme Court decision on immunity.”

They added that they hope the book clears up some confusion among the public about the role of the special counsel.

“A special counsel is not an ‘independent counsel’ like Ken Starr [who investigated the president during the Bill Clinton administration],” they said. “You report to the attorney general, and there’s a balance to be struck between independence and accountability. Both are important considerations; that is not well understood.”

Like the class, the book explains the many paths their investigation took and the choices the lawyers made along the way.

“We hope it will explain some of the complexities for a federal prosecutor investigating possible crimes by a sitting president,” they said. “We suspect some of the complexity will surprise readers — that is what we find in our UVA class each fall, [that] the students are surprised by all that was in play.”

Schwartzman said the Karsh Center was created to support teaching and scholarship focused on democratic principles, especially the rule of law and integrity in public office.

“When we invited Robert Mueller and Aaron Zebley to be Distinguished Fellows, we hoped their engagement with students would be productive,” Schwartzman said. “The course has been a great success, and we are grateful to them and to their colleagues for their contributions in the classroom and for giving so much back to both the Karsh Center and the Law School.”