I’ve been seeing tons of posts on social media this morning about a poll that shows that only 29% of Americans believe that Trump has been cleared of wrongdoing, 32% say Trump has been exonerated on obstruction….blah, blah, blah. This is all pointless speculation, and it’s not even based in the Mueller report.
I have no idea what Mueller found, or didn’t find. None. The only concrete thing I learned from the Barr summary is that Mueller didn’t find enough to establish that Trump colluded with Russia to win an election. But that leaves me with more questions than answers. The top-of-mind question for me is how do Fredo Jr’s emails regarding the meeting in Trump Tower not clearly demonstrate collusion? I can accept that they may not, but I need to understand the reasoning there because that always looked like the smoking gun to me. Perhaps I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the law. Perhaps Mueller is looking for a much higher bar. I don’t know. I need to see his report in order to understand where my assumptions went wrong.
I have thoughts about what the report may contain, but those thoughts are (if I’m being honest with myself) purely speculative and conveniently bolster what I’ve believed for the past two years. I do not know what is in the Mueller report and neither do you.
It’s time to stop speculating about exoneration or guilt. The work has been done and with the glaring lack of sworn testimony by anyone in the Trump family, it seems to be a fairly thorough investigation. I am still at a loss as to how this investigation could be complete without the subjects of the investigation giving testimony, but here we are.
We know that we have nearly two years worth of investigative materials to look through. Let’s look through all of that before making assertions. How’s that for an insane idea? I think it’s reasonable to assume that Mueller found a lot that he referred to other prosecutors. It’s not reasonable to insist that you know what the nature of those referrals is. It’s also not reasonable to insist that we have a “total exoneration”. If that were true, Trump would have used his FEMA alert powers to send the full report to all of our phones in lieu of any summary by Barr.
My point is that we just need to focus our efforts on releasing the report to the public. Let’s dispense with the speculation. We need to see the report. Congress has not even seen the report, which is the first step. The truth is that we may never see the full Mueller report, or even a redacted version. The Nixon report wasn’t released to the public until forty years after it was completed. But we need to push for making the full report public because by pressing that issue might get congress an unreacted version in the next few months. That’s realistically the best we can hope for.
At the very least, I would like to see the executive summary that Mueller almost assuredly included with the report. An executive summary that Barr chose to use one (or part of one) sentence from.
Yes, I have many questions, but I don’t have any answers and claiming that I (or you) do just makes us sound ridiculous. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize and get the full report to congress. We can figure out what happens after that.
