The Mueller Report

So I just finished reading the Mueller report. The whole thing. And it actually wasn't that bad. There are a lot of redundancies. For example, the report will describe a series of events, then in an analysis of those events, it often simply restates the events. There are a lot of footnotes, many of which can simply be glossed over or ignored. The redactions make some sections easily skippable. In some cases, entire pages are redacted. Some of the pages of legal rulings can be skimmed over. And there are multiple appendices. So the 450-page length shouldn't really scare anyone off. It's far smaller than that in terms of actual content.

This first post is going to give an overview of my general thoughts and impressions of the report. Then I'll likely follow up with a deep dive into some specific points and sections.

All in all, despite its length, to me the report seems...incomplete. In many ways, it feels like a preliminary report. Despite two years of investigation, there is very little new that we learned from the report. Some of those new facts are significant, but for the most part the report is just filling in very small details and adding very little to what we already knew from press reports.

This is hugely disappointing. Not because I wanted a particular outcome, which I did. But because it feels like so many threads were cut short. In many, many parts of the report, I would get to the end of a section, and the report would go onto the next section. And I would be expecting a continuation of the facts. There would be nothing. Like I said, I'll cite specific examples in upcoming posts. But this was a disturbing trend.

There were key witnesses that simply weren't interviewed. For example, the two key members of the Trump Tower Meeting, Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya, neither were interviewed by the Special Counsel. Some experts think Don Jr. either took the fifth or threatened to. What is an investigator's recourse when a witness won't assist them? Presumably they look for other evidence. Maybe they try to get a warrant. We have no idea what investigative steps, if any, Mueller took in response to Don Jr. refusing to testify. If we're going off simply what we have in the report, which is meant to be a final report, it seems as if they asked him to testify, he refused, and that was the end of that. If it were that easy to blow off Mueller, why did anyone ever sit down to answer any questions at all?

This was another trend, the lack of description about what investigative steps were taken to either verify or rule out events. Discussing a review of bank records or cell phone tower information shouldn't reveal sensitive sources and methods. We should assume this is the kind of thing the FBI is doing.

The report states very early on that members of the Trump campaign used communication methods to encrypt or delete what they were saying to each other. So I expected to read a lot more discussions of methods that didn't rely on interviews or emails or texts. Yet if you read the report, there's very, very little of that sort of thing. In fact, the bulk of the report reads like a summary of press clippings and interviews. Very often, the only justification for a particular set of facts is an interview with a witness. Now I'm sure they have skilled interviewers, but cross-examination only gets you so far.

What we've been dealing with for two years is smoke, spin, and innuendo. Finally, I hoped to get some facts. There are very few of those that we didn't already know, and many cases where it seemed like those facts should have been relatively easy to discover. So my general impression is that the investigation was not as aggressive or as comprehensive as it should have been. It seems to have pulled up short in many instances. Another possibility is that it was cut short. Mueller turned in his report within about six weeks of Barr becoming Attorney General. Maybe that's not a coincidence.

There are fourteen other investigations in other jurisdictions that Mueller referred. Let's hope those are allowed to proceed without political interference. There is also the main question that I, and I'm sure many other Americans, primarily wanted answered. And that is: Is our President compromised by a foreign power? There were conflicting reports about whether or not the counterintelligence investigation into Trump was being overseen by Mueller. The report seems to indicate that it wasn't, though he shared information with that investigation. So what happened to that investigation? Is it ongoing? If not, what were the results. We need to know. Because the Mueller report is maddeningly, frustratingly incomplete. It doesn't answer the most important questions we need to know, and it leaves threads dangling all over the place.