Seth Abramson's opinion piece makes NEWSWEEK.

[pnwmom]

https://www.newsweek.com/mueller-report-full-text-redactions-william-barr-1381687

After several days of uncritically promoting Trump and his allies’ misleading party line on the Barr Letter, media has settled down and begun reporting only what we know for certain: that Mueller did not find proof beyond a reasonable doubt of the narrow band of collusive activity known as “conspiracy,” though he may yet have found substantial proof of conspiracy and referred to other prosecutors evidence of non-conspiracy collusion; and that there’s no documentation for the claim Mueller asked the Attorney General to make a final judgment on obstruction, with the Special Counsel instead appearing to refer a substantial body of obstruction evidence to Congress for its own judgment on the matter of impeachment.

Yet media’s gradual about-face from its initial reporting on the Barr Letter merely opens up a new trap for corporate and independent journalists alike: that the upcoming release of the Mueller Report will be seen as the dispositive moment in the Mueller investigation. For a host of reasons, this cannot be and must not be; nearly all those reasons relate to machinations by Trump’s allies to render the Mueller Report as close to meaningless as backroom political wrangling can get it.

First, Americans must understand that Attorney General Barr has every authority to ask a federal judge to permit the publication of grand jury transcripts from the Mueller investigation on the grounds that Mueller’s work is critical to our rule of law, democratic processes, and national security. It is hard to imagine a federal case in which the public’s right-to-know is greater than in the case of the Trump-Russia investigation; this is especially so given that most of the grand jury transcripts the public might wish to see involve testimony by high-profile politicians and politicos who chose to place themselves in the public square by working for a presidential campaign and/or (thereafter) a president. These are not shy, retiring private citizens who never thought their words or actions could reach a national audience.

And yet Trump’s Attorney General—who espoused, in a pre-nomination memo that amounted to a job application, a view of presidential power rendering the office all but above the law, with presidential obstruction of justice becoming a legal impossibility—is refusing to request even a single page of grand jury testimony for Americans to see.

SNIP

[uponit7771]

1. K&R,

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. and bars for Barr!