The Mueller report is a dense slab of verbiage. It is not written in bureaucratese, but it is not far from it either. If you were to put a droplet of its syntax under a microscope, you’d find a swirling necktie pattern of small white starched shirts and three-ring binders and paper cups of stale black coffee. Reading between the lines, you might spy tiny handcuffs as well.

This is not a narrative that warms in the hands. There is no sweeping language. It appears to have been designed to make minimum political impact. Because its language about not exonerating Trump is written in the negative, the most important sections are hard to quote.

A typical line is: “A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.” A plausible title for the paperback editions that will soon be in bookstores might be, “We Didn’t Not Find Anything.”

Reports by special counsels and select congressional committees are a genre of their own by now. The Mueller report is a thorny, patriotic addition to this curious American shelf.

Its findings, especially those about the president’s ostensible attempts to obstruct justice, have been called a road map for further congressional action and other investigators. With its blacked-out redacted passages, the report more closely resembles a reverse crossword puzzle. We will collectively be solving for its inky elisions for some time, perhaps the rest of our lives.