The Mueller Report - again!

I haven't yet read the redacted Mueller Report but I'm sure, as a long-time journalist, there will be numerous little paragraphs or footnotes that will leap out as potential stories. That's always the way with reports. The trick as a journalist is to hunt for things that no one officially has actually mentioned. Apart from footnotes, there are also the extra bits at the end that normally no one would bother with, like addenda and sources etc. But overall, I doubt even The New York Times will uncover something so devastating that it will overturn the official line which is that Trump and his campaign team were not guilty of colluding with the Russians. After all, if the attorney general, William Barr, had lied when he said Mueller had found no evidence of collusion, Mueller himself would have said something and we would all have realised the real truth when we started to read the report. So, whether you trust or like Barr or not, the no-collusion conclusion stays. Much more interesting will be the obstruction stuff. Barr says there is insufficient evidence of Trump obstructing justice, just evidence of the president being angry about the accusations which he says was understandable. During his press conference today, Barr rather delightfully, when asked whether Mueller agreed with his judgment that there was insufficient evidence of a crime of obstruction, said he had heard "second hand" that the special counsel agreed with his conclusion and said Barr had the right to make this sort of decision. Who was the "second hand"? The Democrats have made a huge fuss about Barr holding a press conference at all prior to the publication of the redacted Mueller Report. Sorry but that is daft. Every government I can think of would have done the same, trying, in other words, to underline the message that Trump has been cleared. It's not a question of spinning a line. The journalists reading the report will make up their own minds whatever Barr said at the press conference. And anyway, it's helpful to have a few quotes from the attorney general to throw into the story. So now we await the thousands of words that will come from the journalists assigned to gut the report. The most imaginative will try to speculate on what was redacted. The best-informed will tap their contacts in the Mueller team of lawyers and find out what HAS been redacted!