The New York Times is reporting that the Mueller report “exceeds 300 pages” in length. That information is attributed to unidentified “American officials with knowledge of” the matter. If “exceeds 300 pages” means something close to 300 pages, it is less than I would have bet on.
Of course, “exceeds 300 pages” could mean lots more than 300 pages. The Times notes that Fox’s Andrew Napolitano has claimed the report is 700 pages long (his basis for saying so is not clear). The paper also reminds us that Ken Starr’s Clinton-Lewinsky report was 445 pages long, last year’s inspector-general report on the Clinton emails investigation was 500 pages, and the 9/11 Commission report was 567.
Meanwhile, Politico reports that Attorney General Bill Barr has told House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) how long the report is. Nadler has not revealed the number of pages; he has just said it is “very substantial.” When asked whether that means fewer than a thousand pages, Nadler replied, “I would think so.” He added that Barr would not commit to the April 2 deadline House Democrats would like to impose.
Of course, page counts can be much ado about nothing. But the Times and the Democrats seem determined to make something out of them, suggesting that, since Attorney General Barr’s letter about Mueller’s report was only four pages (although the Gray Lady allows that these pages were “dense”), this “raises questions about what Barr might have left out.”
Jim Geraghty has an excellent analysis of this claim in today’s Morning Jolt. The argument that a lengthy report implies deception in Barr’s summary seems silly to me. Almost all lengthy reports come with an executive summary that is, at most, just a few pages long. Lengthy books are routinely and representatively reviewed in just a few hundred words. The attorney general did not undertake to summarize Mueller’s full report; the purpose of his letter was to succinctly state Mueller’s principal conclusions. There is no reason to believe that could not be accurately done in four pages.
No good deed goes unpunished. All of us want the report released, the sooner and more completely the better. But that does not mean we are legally entitled to have the report released. Unlike those who argue “this is what I want, so the law must therefore require it,” Barr has to deal with what the law actually says. In the interim, to ensure that we would have something, he read the lengthy report and turned around a letter about the main findings in less than 48 hours.
Barr also pledged to release the report, in as complete a form as is legally and practically possible, in reasonably rapid fashion. The president seems to support (or, at least, not to oppose) release as well. In writing his summary, then, the AG presumably was operating under the assumption that the report would be released — and that the public and the media would compare his summary with the final document. Barr is a savvy guy with a well-earned reputation for being scrupulous. Why would he misrepresent Mueller’s report in this situation?
As for how much of the report will need to be redacted, the grand-jury hurdle to disclosure that Barr cited is real. I was initially surprised that the AG pointed to grand-jury-secrecy rules as the primary restriction that had to be worked through; I expected the AG to rely on the facts that (a) counterintelligence investigations are classified and (b) Justice Department rules discourage public disclosure of investigative information about people who have not been charged with crimes. Yet there was none of that. Barr mentioned only grand-jury rules (as well as the possible need to withhold some information pertinent to ongoing cases, which should not be much of a factor here). My recollection was that getting grand-jury information unsealed was not difficult — the rules allow it to be done by court order.
