The appointment also makes a public report more likely. While Durham already secured a conviction, prosecutors do not ordinarily prepare reports. Special counsels do. Moreover, with the Mueller report, virtually every Democratic leader demanded that the report be released with no or few redactions. The Trump administration waived most executive privileges and released most of the report except for grand jury information. Even that was not enough for figures like Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “I have said, and I’ll say again, no thank you, Mr. Attorney General, we do not need your interpretation, show us the report and we can draw our own conclusions.” House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler demanded the release of the “full and complete Mueller report, without redactions, as well as access to the underlying evidence.” The Durham appointment will now force Democrats to answer why they do not support the same public release of the report so that voters can “draw our own conclusions.”

The move also complicates the nomination of Sally Yates, who is widely cited as a front-runner for the position of Attorney General. Yates would be placed in an even more precarious position than Jeff Sessions who recused himself to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest at the state of the Trump administration. Yates has a clear and obvious conflict. She played a role in the earlier Russian investigation. That investigation was based in part on the “Steele dossier,” a report by a former British spy which has been shown to be unreliable and flawed. American intelligence warned that Steele’s main source was a likely Russian agent and the dossier may have been used for Russian disinformation. While the Clinton campaign repeatedly denied funding the dossier during the election, reporters later showed that it lied after finding a money trail through Clinton’s campaign legal counsel. Most recently, it was disclosed that President Obama was briefed on an American intelligence report that Clinton had ordered the creation of a Russian collusion story to take pressure off her own scandal involving her private server. Yates testified recently that she has no recollection of these warnings and does not recall knowing about the funding of the Steele dossier.