The Mueller Report

The book that everyone's been waiting for--and one guaranteed to raise as many questions as it answers. The Mueller Report is in the public domain, but the Washington Post adds significant value to it with commentary, additional documents, and timelines. Reporters Marc Fisher and Sari Horwitz, for instance, provide a compare-and-contrast essay on the report's principal, Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI, who, like the ultimate subject of the report, Donald J. Trump, was raised in wealth and privilege but took a sharply different path of service: "At pivotal points in their lives, they made sharply divergent choices--as students, as draft-age men facing the dilemma of the Vietnam War, as ambitious alpha males deciding where to focus their energies." Reporters Rosalind Helderman and Matt Zapotosky, who cover politics and the Justice Department respectively, write that the report was set in motion by "the commander-in-chief's rage," the result of having fired FBI Director James Comey for refusing to avow publicly that the president was not under investigation. The report identifies clear episodes of official obstructions of justice while being very careful in its language. For example, the report makes it quite clear that Mueller and his staff did not consider "collusion" itself a matter for investigation or prosecution, though the more technical charge "conspiracy to defraud the United States" was applied to former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. For all its redacted passages, the report provides specific context to other matters under investigation, including negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Russia: "[Michael] Cohen...discussed the Trump Moscow project with Ivanka Trump as to design elements...and Donald Trump Jr. (about his experience in Moscow and possible involvement in the project) during the fall of 2015--about which Trump responded to questioning under oath, "I vaguely remember press inquiries and media reporting during the campaign about whether the Trump Organization had business dealings in Russia." An essential document for anyone concerned with the unfolding constitutional crisis of the Trump presidency and one that helps make sense of current headlines.

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