Russia

What Does the Mueller Report Really Say?

Written by SK Ashby

The New York Times and Washington Post have both reported that members of special prosecutor Robert Mueller's team say Attorney General William Barr has misrepresented the Mueller report to Congress, so what does the report actually say?

We won't know the full details until the report is released to the public, but it says members of Trump's campaign were manipulated by Russian intelligence according to NBC News.

According to a senior law enforcement official who has spoken to members of Mueller's team, Mueller team members say it includes detailed accounts of Trump campaign contacts with Russia. While Mueller found no coordination or criminal conspiracy, the official said, some team members say his findings paint a picture of a campaign whose members were manipulated by a sophisticated Russian intelligence operation. Some of that information may be classified, the official said, so it's not clear whether it will be released in a few weeks when Barr makes public a redacted version of the Mueller report.

Trump lawyers have pushed back against some of this reporting.

"They're a bunch of sneaky, unethical leakers," Rudy Giuliani said on Fox News about the Mueller team.

Giuliani's reaction tells me that NBC's reporting is at least partially accurate.

I do find it plausible that Mueller's team ultimately concluded that the Trump campaign was literally too stupid to develop a sophisticated scheme that was actually developed by Russian intelligence. But that does not tell us the motivations of Trump himself or those of his children who I personally believe are deeply compromised by foreign intelligence services and business interests.

I also believe we won't know the full extent of how compromised they are until Trump is out of office. A lot of bills are going to come due when they're no longer protected by the presidency.