While You Were Offline: Mueller Report or Bust

Author: Graeme McMillan / Source: WIRED

Last week Democrats in Washington demanded that Attorney General Bill Barr release the Mueller report.

Welcome back! Did you miss us? More importantly, do you feel like you missed some news last week? It’s highly likely that you did—it was a doozy. Not only did President Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen mysteriously find new documents further implicating the president in wrongdoing, news reports outed Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner as someone whom officials thought shouldn’t be given security clearance. On top of that, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange came under new threat of being expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy he’s called home for quite some time. Perhaps we should consider this a week of old favorites reappearing in the news?

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After all, it was also a week where Brexit continued to flounder towards disaster, and even lawyers from the O.J. Simpson trial are back in the public eye. Come to think of it, people have also been talking about Joe Biden and Merrick Garland last week, too. Is this what a glitch in the Matrix looks like? Are we stuck in a never-ending time loop?

Here’s what else people have been talking about over the past seven days. And, perhaps, will still be talking about in the next seven days or longer, if time continues to hold little meaning.

Mueller Report or Bust

What Happened: When will the public see the Mueller report? Last week, that question continued to linger, especially as Congress and even former Mueller associates started to wonder what was really going on with at the Department of Justice.

What Really Happened: Following the delivery of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to Attorney General Bill Barr, Congress demanded to see the full report by April 2. Barr, in response, told them that they’d get a redacted version by “mid-April”. Sure enough, come April 2, Barr hadn’t delivered the report and didn’t seem in any particular rush to do so, which meant there was one obvious next step.

Let’s get the obvious question out the way first, shall we? (The answer to the following question is yes, by the way.)

Before anyone gets too excited about what this might mean, let’s take a breath and consider the reality of what this actually means in practice. Because it’s not as impressive as it looks, really.

Or, maybe it could be?

The issue of whether or not to release the full report became a more pressing one after the subpoenas were approved, however, thanks to a couple of big news stories from The New York Times and The Washington Post that suggested, well, maybe there was a coverup of sorts underway after all.

This went over exactly as you might expect with President Trump, who had already started to back away from his earlier demands to release the report.

More surprisingly, perhaps, the Department of Justice actually responded to the reports. Kind of.

So, does any of this change the question of whether or not the House Intelligence Committee’s subpoenas will be issued? Apparently so.

Oh, and people should perhaps expect more than just the subpoenas, it seems.

The Takeaway: At least we can depend on the reliability of events as they unfold, I guess?

What Happened: President Trump made some threats about immigration, then backed away from them.

What Really Happened: The fact that Trump doesn’t want people from Mexico coming to the US to live is no secret—please remember how his campaign started, after all—but at the start of this week, he doubled down on that. Again.

Yes, the president threatened to close the US/Mexico border entirely last week in order to get his way. (He also announced plans to cut aid to three Central American countries, a move that some explained was more likely to increase illegal immigration.) This was, to say the least, an impractical, if not unrealistic, solution, as many people were quick to point out.