Or, at least, so it feels. BuzzFeed requested a new version of the Mueller Report, now that Roger Stone’s trial has concluded, and the courts obliged. Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic has combed through the newly revealed information, which I won’t be doing, and came up with this:
But there are a few shreds of information that are really, genuinely new, and they’re damning of the president. Namely: Trump had direct knowledge of Roger Stone’s outreach to WikiLeaks, according to multiple witnesses interviewed by Mueller. He encouraged that outreach and asked his campaign chairman to pursue it further, those witnesses said. And Mueller’s office appears to have strongly suspected, without putting it in so many words, that Trump lied to the special counsel in his written answers to Mueller’s questions about the Stone affair.
The redacted report hinted at this. But it’s another thing to see it spelled out unmistakably by the special counsel.
I suspect that, at this juncture, Lawfare really isn’t a non-partisan third party in many observers minds, but partisan is a slippery term: it usually refers to adherents to one side or another for a cause for which neither side can be considered malicious.
This is no longer true for President Trump. His list of incompetencies and malevolencies are too long to bear repeating here; it’s safe to say, though, that most or even all of Lawfare’s contributors are more or less scornful of President Trump and his enablers.
So I can say that it’s unsurprising that Mueller’s report is more incriminating of Trump than the previously heavily redacted report. Trump’s performance in just the last year has been appalling, and I don’t intend to say that in the appallingly partisan, grating manner that I might have read of Obama’s performance on National Review back in the day; as an independent voter who desperately wishes there was a reasonable conservative party that could be considered competent to be a governing party, I have to report that, objectively speaking, Trump’s not worthy of anyone’s support.
Here’s just one example Jurecic provides of many:
“…beginning in June 2016 and continuing through October 2016, Stone spoke about WikiLeaks with senior Campaign officials, including candidate Trump.” (Vol. I, p. 51)
While the redacted report hints at involvement by Trump, the hidden material makes this frustratingly unclear. The unredacted copy directly states that Trump spoke multiple times with Stone about WikiLeaks’s release of material damaging to Clinton. Specifically, according to the report, Stone told the Trump campaign “as early as June 2016”—that is, at least a month before WikiLeaks began its releases on July 22—that Assange would release damaging documents.
It’s all old, unimportant news in one sense, yet it functions as a confirmation of many suspicions of Trump’s mendacity, as well as his enablers’, and should guide future judgments.
