Well, it turns out the wolf really was chasing the sheep this time. From the Washington Post :

The Justice Department notified Congress late Friday that it had received Mueller’s report but did not describe its contents. Barr is expected to summarize the findings for lawmakers in coming days. In a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, Barr wrote that Mueller “has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters.” Barr wrote that Mueller submitted a report to him explaining his prosecution decisions. The attorney general told lawmakers he was “reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.”

Robert Mueller's work is done. Whatever he learned about Russian ratfcking in the 2016 election is now in the hands of Attorney General William Barr, who will share it with Congress, and who will decide how much of it—if any—will be shared with the people who have been blessed with the current President* of the United States.

The attorney general wrote he would consult with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and Mueller “to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Department’s long-standing practices and policies.”

And yes, you can drive a Zis-150 through the hole opened up by that very last clause, especially since we are talking about this administration* and this Justice Department. And now we can count on a fairly long period of leaks and speculation from the entire menagerie of anonymous Washington sources. Most of this will be useless, but all of it will have its moment in the spotlight.

"Transparency," a word that means something different to everyone involved in this tangled investigation, was the watchword on Friday. Barr made a case for it in the very first sentence of his announcement that he'd received the report. A lot is going to depend on how sturdy Mueller's reputation for integrity really is; the president* went after him again Friday morning on the Fox Business Channel. If cooler heads prevail—if, for example, people realize that the factual record may be limited as a result of the narrowness of Mueller's mandate—then we actually might be alright. But I've been watching American politics too closely for the past nine years, and I don't believe cooler heads have much fight left in them any more.

Release the hounds.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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