In fact, Congress has many important legislative purposes that would be served by access to the full Mueller report and underlying documents. The administration’s attempt to deny or slow roll the release of this information is hampering Congress’s ability to draft new legislation to protect our democracy from foreign adversaries.

I know from experience. Last year the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee asked me to testify about several legislative initiatives that could be informed by an understanding of Russia’s 2016 election interference — including any American’s support for those activities. The full Mueller report and underlying documents could provide a trove of valuable information to inform and accelerate such legislation.

Along with Kenneth Wainstein, who served as the head of the Justice Department’s national security division under President George W. Bush, our panel gave the best advice we could on a wide range of legislation proposed by members of the committee, Republican and Democratic, in addition to ideas of our own. The proposed reforms included the expansion of enforcement authority for rules governing foreign agents, closing loopholes in the Lobbying Disclosure Act, defining more precisely the federal crime of conspiracy to defraud the Federal Election Commission, imposing new immigration controls on foreign nationals who interfere in United States elections, prohibiting the use of shell companies to conceal election contributions by foreign nationals, incentivizing collaboration between social media companies and independent evaluators, and adding reporting requirements for political campaigns when approached by foreign agents with stolen information. That is a long list, yet it goes on.

The redacted Mueller report is rich in information, but legislators would very likely benefit enormously by knowing more about a number of things from the pages that have been kept from Congress: how Moscow devised its attempts to penetrate the Trump campaign and the tactical benefits it expected to gain from different parts of the operation, what actions Americans took wittingly and unwittingly to support Kremlin front organizations and WikiLeaks, and why members of the Russian delegation at Trump Tower were not charged with violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. Those are just a few of the many pieces missing from the puzzle.

The Mueller report also hints at specific legislative reforms for the Hill to consider. Congress may need to expand the federal offense of trafficking in stolen property to include hacked emails, define what counts as a “thing of value” when offered to a campaign by a foreign government agent, and improve how the intelligence community coordinates its response and warns political campaigns of foreign threats.