Battered by bogus allegations that Russiagate coverage was botched simply because Trump won't be indicted, many in the press seem to be scrambling to do their best to help the White House bury Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on his investigation. It's arguably the most important government report compiled in the last 30 or 40 years. Yet it's under lock and key, and much of the Washington press doesn't seem to care.
It was bad enough when the media immediately opted to play along with Attorney General William Barr's dubious, three-and-a-half page summary that he released last Sunday, pretending that the cherry-picked document was in any way a credible stand-in for the contents of sprawling, two-year investigation. But by having spent the entire week since then doing its best to prop up the Barr summary while raising virtually no collective demands about seeing the Mueller report itself, the press has played an absolutely central role in the unfolding cover-up.
In a country facing unprecedented political polarization, there's actually huge bipartisan agreement that the Mueller report needs to be made public. That’s a stunning development that received very little news coverage this week. One week after Mueller delivered his report to the Department of Justice, we’re just now finding how many pages it is!
Not surprisingly, Clinton administration alumni are expressing their shock at how the Beltway press corps, which spent most of the ’90s madly pursuing a Democratic president and the GOP-generated scandals around him, seems to have suddenly decided that cozying up to an administration under fire is the best option. "For a moment in 1998 I thought why don’t we get a political flunky to review the Starr report and release a 4 page letter exonerating the President, former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart tweeted facetiously. "Then I thought the press will never fall for that. What a moron I was."
What's so astonishing is the GOP premise for keeping the report secret is so illogical. On what planet does Trump's politicized Department of Justice keep under lock and key a report that supposedly exonerates Trump? The whole idea is insulting, not only to American voters, but to journalists covering the story. It's also humiliating for them. The Mueller report has been anxiously anticipated for two years, with the investigation generating tremendous amount of news coverage. Yet here we are and reporters at the most prestigious news outlets in the nation have no access to the report and no idea what Mueller actually concluded, let alone what all the underlying evidence shows. It's embarrassing—and unprecedented—for Beltway scandal coverage.
My hunch is that it’s a stab at self-preservation. Rather than wallow in the fact that the hidden report represents another colossal F-you from Trump to the media, and rather than emphasize how impotent the press is in terms of getting its hands on the Mueller report, journalists would rather pretend the whole charade isn't happening. And the way to do that is to act as if the dubious Barr summary actually is the Mueller report, and to pretend we do know what's in it.
And so Mueller postmortems are pouring in as journalists, who typically demand access to documents when evaluating investigations, make sweeping conclusions based on the Barr press release. The "Mueller report is out," CBS News erroneously announced.
Reminder: No journalist has read the Mueller report. Not one. That's why "Trump’s Attorney General Claims Mueller Report Clears the President" is what an accurate headline would've looked like this week. But I didn't see many like that. Did you?
New York Times columnist Dave Leonhardt wrote that "much of the media was too credulous about Barr’s letter, producing banner headlines and chyrons that treated it as an objective summary of Mueller’s work rather than as a political document meant to make President Trump look good." So true. But Leonhardt failed to concede that the Times itself has been among the worst offenders on this front.
Last Sunday as word of the Barr memo spread, the Times rushed to report that Trump had been exonerated and that Mueller's conclusions had provided Trump with a "powerful boost" toward re-election. The Times made that sweeping conclusion having read not a single page of the Mueller report.
Note that another Times columnist, Farhad Manjoo, wrote an entire piece that again and again referred to the findings of the Mueller report, even though nobody has seen it. "Robert Mueller seems to have concluded after a definitive investigation, Mr. Trump’s win was not the illegitimate product of a treasonous conspiracy," he wrote. But how does Manjoo know that? For the record, even if you accept Barr's word as binding, his brief summary claims that Mueller found no evidence that Trump or his campaign criminally conspired with agents of "the Russian government." Barr doesn't say if Mueller found evidence that Trump and his campaign orchestrated with Russian players outside of the government, or if those actions simply didn't rise to level of criminality.
Additionally, Manjoo belittled "the aggrieved and embarrassed #resistance-tweeting punditocracy now throwing up endless reasons for downplaying Mr. Mueller’s finding: We still haven’t seen the whole report! "The whole report"? We haven't seen one page of the Mueller report. In fact, Barr's summary didn't even quote a single, complete sentence from the Mueller report.
Stonewalling Republicans won't release the Russia investigation findings, but the Washington Post this week insisted it's Democrats who look bad because they "boxed themselves in" on the Russia story. Buried halfway down the article, though, was this caveat: "Unless and until we see the actual report and its obstruction-related findings, we don’t know how problematic Trump’s conduct might be."
Y'think?
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.
