The investigation is so vast it’s impossible to sum it up even in the full copy of the report—and certainly not in William Barr’s redacted version.
Every great film needs a climactic moment, the thinking goes, so American media is positioning the release of the “Mueller Report”—essentially just a summary of a case file believed to be hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pages long—to be the single moment that either saves or damns the Trump presidency. News-watchers shouldn’t be fooled, however: the release of Mueller’s summary of his nearly two years of investigative work, while an important milestone in the most complex and far-ranging federal criminal investigation of our lives, is merely a marker in time little different from many such markers that we’ve already seen and will see as the Trump-Russia story continues to unfold. If it’s an ending, it’s an ending of one of this historically harrowing story’s earliest chapters—that’s all.
When American media was, en masse, furiously predicting the exact date of the Mueller Report’s release—getting its prediction wrong on at least eight occasions dating back to the fall of 2017—it told its readers and viewers that Mueller was “farming out” a high percentage of his investigative leads to other jurisdictions. In 2017 and 2018, media took that fact merely as a sign that Mueller was almost done with his work, and not, as we must see it in 2019, as a sign that Mueller was, well, farming out a high percentage of his investigative leads to other jurisdictions. In other words, what we read on Thursday, April 18—when a heavily redacted version of the Mueller Report will be released to Congress and the public—will be nothing more than (a) a brutally edited version, of (b) a summary, of (c) a massive case file that has itself (d) been largely sent elsewhere for investigation by other federal prosecutors. Anyone who thinks the Trump-Russia investigation can be in any sense summarized by a two-topic 300- or 400-page report that is missing a quarter of its pages in has not been following the Trump-Russia story from the start.
I’ve written two books on Trump-Russia collusion—Proof of Collusion, released at the end of 2018, and Proof of Conspiracy, forthcoming in August—and even in avoiding much discussion of Trump’s obstruction and witness tampering in these books (as these actions were already known by most, by virtue of having occurred publicly) my research swelled to nearly 1,000 pages. Because the books were written in a “government-report” style—with most sentences containing a discrete block of evidence and footnoted to one or more major-media citations—those 1,000 pages were the most condensed version of the Trump-Russia story I could tell. So the notion that Mueller was going to tell in full the tale of Trump-Russia collusion in the half of a heavily redacted 300- or 400-page summary not focused on obstruction of justice was always fanciful.
Here, then, is the reality: Mueller’s April 18 summary serves the primary purpose of passing on to the United States Congress the full archive of evidence on Trump’s fifty to a hundred acts of obstruction of justice while president, with that archive useful to Congress in determining whether impeachment proceedings are warranted.
