No one outside the Department of Justice has seen the Mueller report. Neither Congress nor the public has seen even one full sentence of the Mueller report. All that’s been seen is a summary created by Attorney General William Barr, who, in just over a day, not only turned the report into less than four pages, but took time out to personally absolve Donald Trump of obstruction.
But Trump and Republicans are certainly trying to get the most out of the Barr letter. And that includes trying to smash the First Amendment by silencing critics, demonizing the media, and threatening reporters who provide the facts. Not only is Trump continuing to deploy his violent Stalinist “enemy of the people” rhetoric in describing the media, but Trump’s campaign has actually sent a letter to television stations telling them to not book Democratic politicians as guests because they made statements about Trump’s collusion with Russia. That letter accuses politicians from Adam Schiff to Eric Swalwell of making “outrageous claims” and argues they shouldn’t be allowed on the air.
What the letter doesn’t say is that everything in the quotes included as evidence of these outrageous statements remains absolutely true. Not one of these things is changed by the letter that Barr issued: Russia interfered in the 2016 election, including using military forces to conduct operations that broke into servers owned by U.S. citizens and stealing private emails. The Trump campaign, and Donald Trump personally, were aware that this action had taken place even before it was known to authorities. Trump personally, along with his campaign, welcomed the Russian interference and invited more. Members of Trump’s staff met with Russian officials and operatives over 100 times and repeatedly lied about those meetings to the public, the media, the Congress, and investigators. When his son was caught lying about meeting with Russian operatives at the campaign headquarters in Trump Tower, Donald Trump personally dictated a cover letter from Air Force One that provided a false narrative to mislead the press and investigators. Trump’s campaign chair, deputy campaign chair, national security adviser, and campaign foreign policy adviser were all convicted of felonies alongside the dozens of Russian operatives charged by the investigation.
If the media really wants to improve its on-air accuracy, there’s one step it could take that would bring immediate and enormous improvements: It could stop carrying the man who lied knowingly and openly over 8,000 times in two years. And before the White House pounds on the Barr summary of the Mueller report as a basis to attack anyone, it might think about attacking the man who called that investigation “biased” and “conflicted” and “illegal” and “a hoax” and “a witch hunt” not just dozens, but hundreds of times.
As a result of Trump’s own actions, his Republican deputy attorney general appointed a Republican special counsel to conduct an investigation, and discussed the possibility of other action with the Republican acting director of the FBI. And when the results of that investigation were produced, a Republican attorney general wrote Trump a version of the report pared-down and carefully edited to file away all the sharp edges. The investigation wasn’t started, conducted, or completed by Democrats—no matter how many times Trump inserted “17 angry Democrats” into his tweets describing the Mueller investigation. Its conclusion doesn’t represent a conviction of Democrats or the media any more than it represents an exoneration of Trump.
Trump spent almost two years demeaning Mueller, his investigative team, and everyone connected with the Department of Justice or the FBI … but now that Barr has edited a nice letter, Trump and Republicans are perfectly willing to use “the witch hoax” as a basis to attack others. However, before anyone gets out the lynching ropes for either the media or Democratic politicians, it might also be a good idea to see the actual document Mueller produced. Barr’s letter might be a fairly accurate summary. It might not.
What we know now is that when it comes to two specific actions Russia took against the United States, Mueller’s investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” We also know that the investigation defined coordination as “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.” That’s the limit of what we know. We don’t know the context of either of these brief quotes. We don’t even know if the coordination described in the second quote is meant to describe the actions discussed in the first. We know that Donald Trump Jr. said, “I love it!” when told of Russia’s plan to help his father by using stolen documents. We know that Trump called on “Russia, if you’re listening” to do more hacking for him. We know that George Papadopoulos was inside the campaign urging not just use of the stolen materials, but direct meetings with Russian officials. We know that multiple members of Trump’s campaign had connections to how that material was distributed. And Mueller also knew all those things. We don’t know how all of that came down to the statements included in Barr’s letter.
When it comes to obstruction of justice, we know that Mueller told Barr that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” and we know that Mueller at one point states that “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.” But we know nothing of how these sentence fragments are connected, or that Mueller intended for Barr to make an overnight decision absolving Trump of obstruction despite Trump’s taking actions that seem nearly identical to those that earned both Paul Manafort and Roger Stone charges of witness tampering.
We know that Barr says that his reason for not indicting Trump was not DOJ rules against indicting a sitting executive. We do not know if those rules were behind Mueller’s decision to offer no further indictments. Because we do not have so much as a single complete sentence from Robert Mueller’s report.