In the most memorable scene in the most anticipated government report in recent history, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, takes us inside the Oval Office on May 17, 2017. President Trump, having fired the F.B.I. director in an apparent effort to shut down the investigation of him and his 2016 campaign, was in the middle of interviewing candidates for the new vacancy. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, much to the President’s fury, stepped out of the room to take a phone call. He returned with bad news: his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, had appointed Mueller to be a special counsel and conduct an independent investigation. Russiagate would live on. Trump “slumped” over in his chair, according to the report. “Oh, my God, this is the end of my Presidency,” he said. “I’m fucked.”

For now, at least, it appears that he was wrong. The appointment of Mueller did not lead to the end of Trump’s Presidency. Not yet, and probably not ever. The release of the special counsel’s report, on Thursday, showed that Mueller did not turn up conclusive evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians who interfered in the 2016 election to boost Trump’s candidacy. But the report’s belated publication, almost four weeks to the day after Mueller submitted it to Attorney General William Barr, is hardly the “complete and total exoneration” that Trump initially claimed it was and that Barr misleadingly and incompletely portrayed to the country. We knew that wasn’t the case the minute Trump said it.

What we didn’t know until Thursday, when we finally saw the four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page document, is how much evidence Mueller had amassed about the President, panicked and in crisis mode, trying to shut down and block the investigation. The report documents ten different incidents that raise questions about the President’s behavior. Was it obstruction of justice? The Mueller report concluded (albeit in legalistic and unclear language) that that is a matter for Congress to decide. And Congress, as a matter of political calculation and senatorial math, remains unlikely to pursue the question to its bitter end.

“This is the end of my Presidency” seems as though it will go down as one of Trump’s most memorable quotes. The famously self-pitying President went on to complain, according to the report, “This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.” Hope Hicks, Trump’s spokeswoman at the time, saw him soon after. She testified to the special counsel that she had seen Trump that upset only once before: on October 7, 2016, when the “Access Hollywood” tape came out. The parallel is instructive. Even people in Trump’s inner circle believed the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump is heard bragging about forcing himself on women, would spell the end of his White House hopes. Reince Priebus, who would go on to become Trump’s first White House chief of staff, told him that the race was over. But, of course, that is not how the story ended. Trump won on Election Day, though it was a messy victory and will always have an asterisk next to it: Trump is one of only a few Presidents in American history to win the Presidency via the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. The Mueller report appears to have arrived at a similar outcome. Trump has won in the sense that his Presidency is almost certainly not going to end because of the investigation. But there will always be an asterisk next to this, too: Was there obstruction or wasn’t there? What should we make of all the dozens and dozens of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian representatives during 2016? There was evidence, but it did not “establish” that a crime took place, the special counsel has told us. So what did take place? In the absence of some definitive new investigation, the asterisk will remain.

So, too, will the portrait of the White House that Mueller and his team have produced, which is surely one of the most damning insider accounts ever written about a Presidency in modern times. What the report portrays, in numbing legalese and revealing footnotes, is a breathtaking culture of lying and impunity, distrust and double-dealing. Trump is its architect, its chief practitioner, and its greatest beneficiary. Of course, much has been said and written in the past two and a half years about the toxic nature of the Trump White House, about its epic levels of staff turnover and its vicious climate of suspicion and backstabbing. All that and more seem to be true, according to the account that emerges from the Mueller report, and there is a value to having this recorded for posterity. It is not just another best-selling book based on anonymous sources; it is based on sworn testimony and on contemporaneous notes, e-mails, and phone records that only a prosecutor could have had access to.

Many commentators were surprised and outraged that Attorney General Barr held on to the report for as long as he did. Soon after he received it, he released a four-page summary, which now seems more than a little discordant with the tone and substance of Mueller’s actual findings. On Thursday morning, he held a twenty-two-minute press conference at the Justice Department to weigh in, once again, with his own views of how exculpatory the report is for President Trump—all before letting anyone actually read it. In his press conference, Barr made a number of dubious and highly questionable claims, such as an assertion that the White House had fully coöperated with Mueller’s investigation and that Mueller had found “no evidence” of the Trump campaign conspiring with Russia. In fact, the report details the many ways in which Trump was not only refusing to coöperate with the investigation but was doing his best to shut it down. For instance, he tried to get the White House counsel to fire Mueller and repeatedly lied about doing it. The Mueller report also notes that the lack of a conclusion about whether there was a conspiracy between Trump and Russia “does not mean there was no evidence.” But, having now read the report, I am not surprised by how the Attorney General chose to characterize it; William Barr, it turns out, is a perfect representative of the Trump Administration.

We pretty much knew this was coming. On Wednesday evening, President Trump himself announced that Barr would give a press conference the next morning. Then came news from the Justice Department that Congress and the public would get the report only after the press conference. Then came a Times report that the Justice Department had, in fact, briefed White House lawyers about the Mueller findings before the release, aiding their preparations to rebut it. To say that Washington heads were exploding would be an understatement. Imagine Richard Nixon announcing that Leon Jaworski would be giving a press conference the next day to exonerate him, and you get some sense of how this late-breaking information was received. By 8 P.M., Representative Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Democratic-controlled House, was telling reporters that the “Attorney General appears to be waging a media campaign on behalf of President Trump, the very subject of the investigation at the heart of the Mueller report.” The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, tweeted, “AG Barr has thrown out his credibility and the DOJ’s independence with his single-minded effort to protect @realdonaldtrump above all else.” And all this was before a single redacted page had hit the Internet.