The Cover-up

The Justice Department announced yesterday that the redacted copy of Robert Mueller's report on the Trump/Russia investigation will be released on Thursday, one of the slowest news says of the year with the least public attention, given that it falls just before Good Friday and Easter. So was this intentional or coincidental?

Also yesterday, the intelligence industry magazine Just Security broke the story (link here) that Trump's current Attorney General William Barr nearly thirty years ago deceptively redacted an important legal memo for Congress. Barr is leading the redaction team reviewing Mueller's 400-plus page Trump/Russia report.

As the linked article notes: when the memo "was finally made public long after Barr left office, it was clear that Barr’s summary had failed to fully disclose the [document]’s principal conclusions.... The document was replete with quotations from court cases, legal citations, and the language of the [memo] itself. Despite its highly detailed analysis, this 13-page version omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion. And there was evidently no justifiable reason for having withheld those parts from Congress or the public."

In a phrase, Barr has a history of partisan-fueled deception. If the released Mueller report is heavily redacted, then we know who is responsible and why.