Now we know why Attorney General William Barr went to such great lengths to spin the contents of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Although Mueller’s team didn’t establish that Trump or anybody connected to his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russian trolls and hackers, the investigation dug up voluminous evidence that the President repeatedly tried to hamper, and even close down, the Russia investigation. The only partial mystery that remains is why Mueller backed away from concluding whether Trump’s efforts at obstruction amounted to a crime.

The body of the report provides new details about some interventions that we already knew about, including Trump’s request to the F.B.I. director, James Comey, to lay off Michael Flynn, the national-security adviser; his subsequent firing of Comey; and his attempt, in June, 2017, to get rid of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, to Trump’s fury, had recused himself from the Russia investigation. We also learned that Trump called the White House counsel, Don McGahn, from Camp David to order him to have Mueller fired, and that McGahn then called Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, and told him the President had asked him “to do crazy shit.”

The report also reveals previously undisclosed instances of the President’s bullying tactics, such as when, shortly after McGahn refused to fire Sessions, Trump asked Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, to tell the Attorney General to unrecuse himself and order Mueller to focus the Russia investigation on preventing future election interference. He also told Lewandowski to ask Sessions to issue a public statement saying that Trump hadn’t done anything wrong and there shouldn’t even be a special-counsel investigation. Lewandowski passed off some of these requests to Rick Dearborn, a senior White House official who had previously worked as Sessions’s chief of staff. According to the report, Dearborn “did not follow through.”

In assessing Trump’s behavior, the report uses some satisfyingly plain English, such as this paragraph on page 156 of the second volume, which relates to obstruction:

Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations. The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony. Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President’s direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only—a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation.

Although the report doesn’t contain a formal prosecutorial judgment, it does dismiss some of the possible defenses for Trump’s efforts to influence the Russia investigation, such as the fact that some of them were carried out in public, often via his Twitter account. As the report notes, “many of the President’s acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, occurred in public view. While it may be more difficult to establish that public-facing acts were motivated by a corrupt intent, the President’s power to influence actions, persons, and events is enhanced by his unique ability to attract attention through use of mass communications. And no principle of law excludes public acts from the scope of obstruction statutes. If the likely effect of the acts is to intimidate witnesses or alter their testimony, the justice system’s integrity is equally threatened.”

The report also goes directly to the issue of Trump’s intent, and it dismisses the argument that he cannot be culpable for obstruction because the report didn’t find evidence of underlying collusion: