The Juiciest Sections of the Mueller Report Are Redaction City
Merry Mueller Report Christmas! The special counsel’s long-awaited report on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election (Does your brain go to sleep halfway through these phrases that you’ve heard approximately one million times? Mine too!) is finally here, and, after a highly dubious press conference by Attorney General William Barr, the document itself has been made public. Okay, sort of—the parts you probably really wanted to read are so redacted as to reveal almost nothing, looking more like Jenny Holzer installations than government documents. Let’s dive in . . . to a Mueller-report pool that has essentially very little water in it. For example, here’s page 20:
And here’s page 30:
First and foremost, we’ve learned from the report that both Barr and Trump’s boasting of “no collusion” and Trump’s touting of “total exoneration” are bogus—and this is probably good to note. “While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” the report’s concluding section reads. But, again, it doesn’t really commit to saying the opposite. So we’re left with parsing through details that could pertain to other investigations or pending indictments or even possibly leave the door open to impeachment, if you believe in that sort of thing.
This is where even the most discerning (read: broken-brained) Mueller scholar is thwarted by redaction lines the size of Trump’s golf pants. The places where “Harm to Ongoing Matter” blocks out exactly what’s going on are huge, tremendous even, especially in the “Trump Campaign and the Dissemination of Hacked Materials” section. To recall Donald Trump Jr.’s words on hearing that a Kremlin-connected lawyer was offering the Trump campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton, “If it’s what you say, I love it,” if it’s what you say but you redact it within an inch of its life, I don’t love it so much.
We can glean a few things: that in late summer 2016 Trump directly knew that “more releases of damaging information would be coming” and that “the Trump campaign was planning a press strategy . . . based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks”; that Donald Trump Jr., among other associates, retweeted messages from accounts controlled by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm; and that Mueller also declined to prosecute Jr. because he didn’t believe the government could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Trump Tower “June 9 meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful.” LOL.
But in the end, what gives? Except our collective national sanity? After all that, the result still seems to Mueller texting “idk” in the group chat of these United States. Thankfully, there are people who will dedicate the next 14 to 48 hours to this document, including those who preordered it from Barnes & Noble (to whom I ask, are you okay?), and they will maybe have more interesting things to say. Until then, perhaps we should all go outside.
