Mueller Musings

On the television news today there was a report that special investigative attorney Mueller's report "may be released in a matter of days."

On the internet news the headline is that "Bombshell Mueller report may never be fully released.

I guess I should withhold judgement until whatever happens, if it happens, happens, but at this point a couple of comments:

1.  After all of this lead up, the entire freaking report should be released in full no matter what.

It should be released as putting the country through all of this and then just teasing the public with whatever it says would be cruel and stupid.  Cruel for obvious reasons, and stupid for the well known evidence of history that even pretending something is withheld leads to endless speculation.  Some are still speculating on the Kennedy assassination, for goodness sakes.  When I was a kid, a few still were speculating on the Lincoln murder.

And I don't care if its devastating to anyone.  The result of failing to disclose what was known about one person or another has given us entirely false histories on some thing, the internal history of the United States and the United Kingdom during the Cold War for one.   Were you aware that one of the leaders of the British Labor Party was known to have been a KGB informant until 1968 (this was learned after 1968) but British intelligence chose to keep it to themselves until fairly recently?  They shouldn't have.  Even now its denied, a la Alger Hiss style.

2.  I don't care if Mueller is the greatest lawyer on earth, this investigation is a good example of why you don't give special attorney generals open ended commissions or assign projects to lawyers who are 74 years old.  Commissions of this type should have a reasonable time limit to them in which they expire absent an extension so that the people assigned to them don't take two years to get a single investigation completed, if not longer than that.  If that's too much for the person assigned, it should go to somebody who can get it done.  If its too complicated to get done, as it turns out, report on that and why.  If commissions of the type issued by the United States were issued in ancient Rome, the report of the special investigator looking into the murder of Julius Caesar would be coming out "soon".

By saying all of this I'm not commenting on the quality of the investigation or its results.  It may be great work.  But if its work that would require or even suggest requiring impeachment, it's taken so long that the work will have been nearly completely pointless in this term (although it would certainly have some impact on a campaign for reelection) and even if Congress got rolling on that it would be literally all they would do for the next two years.  If it doesn't suggest that, whatever it has suggested, and its lead to an impressive number of indictments so far, its taken far too long to get there and its added endlessly to news cycle drama that's been dramatic enough as it was.