The Mueller Report Might Not Be as Good for Trump as His Attorney General Says It Is
Less than two weeks after Trump attorney general Bill Barr received the Mueller report, processed the entire document in 48 hours, and then issued a four-page letter assuring everyone that it clears the president of both collusion- and obstruction-related wrongdoing, anonymous members of the special counsel's team have begun disputing these sunny conclusions in media reports. As it turns out, a cabinet member who auditioned for his job by opining that it is legally impossible for Trump to have obstructed justice may not have been entirely forthcoming with his hasty proclamations of executive innocence.
In The New York Times, "some of [Mueller's] investigators" who harbor "simmering frustrations" have told associates that Barr's findings "failed to accurately portray the findings of their inquiry" and are "more troubling for President Trump" than Barr disclosed. The Washington Post says the Mueller team describes the obstruction evidence as "alarming," "significant," and "much more acute than Barr suggested." A "U.S. official briefed on the matter" also recounted to the Post "immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work." The fact that investigators feel compelled to speak out now, after two years of enduring near-constant attacks from the White House and still not leaking a thing in response, suggests that these passages are perhaps the PG-rated versions of how they really feel about it.
One particularly interesting detail of the Post's account is that the Mueller team prepared summaries of their work, which they "assumed" Barr would share with the public, only to watch as he instead substituted his words for theirs. A DOJ-adjacent source explained this discrepancy to the Post by alleging that those summaries contained "sensitive information that will likely require redaction." This assertion is strange at best and fishy at worst; it seems unlikely that a team of superstar prosecutors would have torpedoed the usefulness of their own work product by lacing it with "sensitive information" preventing its release. (Also, perhaps assuming the good faith of an attorney general who praised firing James Comey as "the right call" was, in retrospect, a naïve thing to do.)
As the Times notes, their sources declined to explain why they believe the report is worse for Trump than the attorney general says it is; how much (if anything) Mueller's team conveyed to Barr about what it intended for him to release; and how pervasive this sense of disgruntlement is among the special counsel's office of several dozen members. Without this context, it is impossible for anyone to determine the significance of the purported dispute. In the meantime, divining the precise implications of these anecdotes is as absurd as all the overwrought parsing of Barr's word choice—like trying to discern the plot of a movie based only on mumbled snippets of conversation as patrons file out of the theater.
Confusion and uncertainty, however, are Trump's most valuable tools as he works to convince Americans that the special counsel's office delivered, in his idiosyncratically capitalized words, a "Complete and Total EXONERATION." Even if the Barr letter's conclusions are not supported by the actual report's evidence, the mere act of releasing the letter conferred a sort of first-mover advantage on the White House. It knew well that with Mueller mania at a fever pitch, the press would promptly bestow credulous, embarrassing coverage on even the tiniest morsels of report-related information, no matter how dubious the source. A BBC reporter, responding to the Times and Post accounts, wondered whether Democrats who push back against the Barr letter risk looking like "sore losers" now that "the public narrative has already been formed," which sort of raises the question of who, exactly, she thinks is responsible for enabling the aforementioned public narrative to emerge in the first place.
Today, the only appropriate conclusion to draw about the Mueller report is still the same one that was available after the Barr letter's release: None of the American public's very important questions about what happened in 2016 will be resolved until they can read the damn report. The Justice Department has promised to deliver on this promise by "mid-April, if not sooner," which means that we'll all be able to judge its contents—and Barr's truthfulness—soon enough.
