- The Mueller report was released this week, revealing that Russia interfered in the election and made contacts with Trump associates, but did not find a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia.
- The report also investigated potential obstruction of justice by the president, stating that if they had confidence he did not commit obstruction, they would say so.
- The report highlights instances of incompetence and disorganization within Trump's campaign, which may have saved him from closer coordination with Russia.
- It also shows that many administration officials ignored Trump's orders, including former White House counsel Don McGahn who prepared to quit rather than carry out Trump's request to remove Mueller as special counsel.
- The concern is that many of the people who ignored Trump are now gone, and newer figures seem more aligned with the president.

- The release of the Mueller report was downplayed by Trump's Attorney General, William Barr, who also held a press conference to spin the report's contents in favor of Trump.
- Barr's statements were misleading and mischaracterized the report's findings.
- The report shows that Trump was frustrated by the investigation and believed it was undermining his presidency.
- Trump did not fully cooperate with the investigation and did not sit down for an interview.
- There are significant redactions in the report and references to 14 investigations handed off to other prosecutors.
- The report confirms that Russia interfered in the election and Trump's campaign seemed eager to accept their help.
- Trump may have obstructed justice and his subordinates may have ignored his orders.
- The Attorney General has been dishonest.
- It is important to have knowledge of the report's findings for Congress and voters.
- The alternative is to be uninformed and easily manipulated.

Following the release of the Mueller Report, John Oliver discusses what we’ve learned.

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ We begin tonight, obviously, with the major news of the week.

The dramatic release of 1 man's painstaking work and the impact it may have on history.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ -♪♪ -♪♪ That's right.

It's Queen Elizabeth's 93rd birthday today, and that guy just fucking nailed it.

But obviously, there was 1 other major story this week concerning the latest installment in the ongoing saga that we've been calling Stupid Watergate.

Basically, Watergate, but if Nixon had been kicked in the head by a billy goat, and also if that billy goat had been the White House chief of staff.

And the reason we're talking about this is that on Thursday, the Mueller report was finally released.

It was over 400 pages long, and many in the media chose to make a feature of processing it in plain sight.

MSNBC had Ari Melber reading it in the corner of the studio, as if relegated to the kids' table, while New York 1 aired 30 uninterrupted seconds of their printer getting ready to print the report out.

But, once the Mueller report had actually been read, it became clear that there was a lot in it.

Mueller confirmed that Russia interfered in our election, made repeated contacts with Trump associates, but did not conclude that the Trump team engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia.

But the report said several actions by the president were investigated as potentially amounting to obstruction of justice.

Mueller's team says, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.

And that last 1 is a pretty conspicuous non-exoneration.

If you were interviewing a job applicant and they told you, just so you know, I wasn't found guilty of fucking my neighbor's mailboxes, but I also specifically wasn't found innocent.

You would not necessarily rule them out, but you definitely think twice about hiring them.

And some of the details in this report were incredible.

When Trump learned that special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, he slumped back in his chair and said, Oh, my God, this is terrible.

-$TIME OUT And while we obviously don't know whether Trump will face any repercussions from this report, I'd like to just live for a little longer in the moment of him saying, This is the end of my presidency.

In fact, I'd like to take some artistic license to fully paint that scene for you.

Trump, upon learning Robert Mueller was appointed, slumping back in his chair.

Meanwhile, Ivanka is playing fetch with Don Jr.

Eric's tongue is stuck to a somehow frozen flagpole.

Ryan's previous is walking around with his head inside a honeypot.

Jared is standing motionless directly in front of a blank wall.

Steve Bannon is stress-eating a bowl of used syringes.

And Stephen Miller is gleefully pulling the legs off a spider.

While Trump says those beautiful words as tears roll down his cheeks, this is the end of my presidency, I'm fucked.

And right at that very moment, a pigeon flies into the room and shits in his mouth.

And, And I'm not saying that that's what happened.

I'm just saying we don't definitively know that it didn't.

And look, look, we clearly can't cover everything in the report tonight.

So instead, I'd like to concentrate on 2 key factors that may have saved the president here.

Incompetence when it comes to conspiracy with Russia, and disobedience when it comes to obstruction of justice.

So let's start with incompetence, meaning, let's start with Michael Cohen.

Because the report spells out that Cohen was in contact with Russians through much of the campaign, mostly concerning Trump's efforts to build a tower in Moscow, which in and of itself is already wildly inappropriate.

It is clearly compromising for a presidential candidate to be asking for business favors from a hostile foreign government.

But from the very beginning, Cohen was laughably inept.

At 1 point, he reached out to Putin's press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, but couldn't get through.

It turns out, that's because he meant to email PRPeskova at PRPress.gov, but actually emailed .gof instead.

And .gof, of course, sends you right to the server for the new HBO series, Game of Flounder, where powerful Flounder families fight for control of the 7 sandbars.

And another, Another even more ridiculous case of Cohen bungling contact with Russians involved Dmitry Klokov, a former press secretary to Russia's energy minister.

Klokov's ex-wife had contacted Ivanka, offering his assistance to the Trump campaign.

So, that is someone with ties to the Russian government offering help to elect Trump.

Ivanka forwarded that email to Cohen, who Googled Dmitry Klokoff, and concluded that the person they must be talking about was a former Olympic weightlifter by that name, a man who has videos online like this.

♪ -♪ Cohen apparently saw that and thought, well, I definitely got the right Dmitry Klokov.

Apparently, Russia's Energy Minister's Press Secretary is completely jacked.

APPLAUSE And from all appearances, the real Klokoff kept trying to set up a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin.

But Cohen basically blew that proposal off, which may not be surprising, given that, even during his interviews with Mueller, Cohen still appeared to believe that the Klokoff he spoke with was the Olympic weightlifter.

He was probably still trying to figure out why deceased German ice hockey goalie Robert Muller wanted to speak with him in the first place.

The report found multiple instances where people tied to the Russian government offered Trump's campaign assistance, and in some instances, the campaign was receptive.

But the thing that seemed to stop closer coordination from happening was often cartoonish levels of disorganization and incompetence.

On top of which, there were times when the Trump team's ignorance of basic legal concepts seems to have actively helped shield them from criminal liability.

Most notably, when it came to the infamous Trump Tower meeting featuring Don Jr., Jared, Paul Manafort, and a Russian offering more dirt.

Mueller's team concluded, it would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful.

Yeah, that kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

It is gonna be hard to prove that this guy had general knowledge that his conduct could be breaking the law, or that he had general knowledge of anything at all, other than what it feels like to watch flags get more hugs from your dad than you get if you live to be a thousand.

So, so, so when it comes to conspiracy, Trump's saving grace may have been that, despite Russians wanting to help, everyone around him was too inept to work with them.

So as for the other major question in Mueller's report, obstruction of justice, Trump's saving grace there may have been that, despite ample evidence that he tried to do it, everyone around him was too disobedient to listen.

The report paints a remarkable portrait of the president as a man obsessed with the Russia investigation, trying to seize control of the inquiry through his White House aides.

It highlights at least 10 current and former administration officials or associates who did not carry out his orders.

The news that the president ordered subordinates to do things that might constitute obstruction, and then they just ignored him, is both reassuring and also terrifying.

That's like hearing your spouse say, you don't have to worry about the snake because the baby killed it.

I'm glad the snake is dead, but that means there was a fucking snake in there.

And it also means our baby has snake-killing strength.

I'm sorry, there's a lot to process here.

I'm happy, I'm relieved, but I'm also angry and confused.

-$1.5 MILLION And there are multiple instances of people ignoring the president's instructions, like when Trump asked Corey Lewandowski to send his attorney general a message.

The president gave him orders to tell the attorney general, then Jeff Sessions, to curtail the scope of the Russia investigation.

Now Lewandowski, according to the report, never followed through on it, attempting to pass it off to another aide who did also not follow through on what the president instructed.

So that's a chain of 2 people failing to follow through on a demand from the president.

And it didn't stop there because that aide then passed Trump's order off to an assistant who opened the window and

who wrote it down and taped it to a Roomba that was passing by, which drove itself straight into the river.

Because this isn't why it got into government.

--LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE --Although the most shocking example of the president being ignored involved former White House counsel Don McGahn.

Trump apparently called and directed him to have Mueller removed as special counsel.

McGahn refused, but Trump kept pushing until finally this happened.

Instead of carrying out Trump's request, McGahn decided he would quit instead.

Quote, he called his lawyer, drove to the White House, packed up his office, prepared to submit a resignation letter with his chief of staff, told Reince Priebus that the president has asked him to do crazy blank, and informed Priebus and Bannon that he was leaving.

Preparing to quit because you're being asked to do crazy shit isn't what you expect from the White House counsel.

It's what you expect from Nicolas Cage's personal assistant.

I'm not constructing a ten-foot voodoo doll of you out of rare gemstones and dead crows.

And look, you might take some reassurance from the fact that so many of the people in Trump's orbit did not do as he asked.

But the worrying thing is, lots of those people are gone now.

And the newer figures seem very much on the same page as the president.

Just look at how the report was released.

Not only did Trump's Attorney General, William Barr, vastly downplay its contents in his letter summarizing it to Congress, but he also gave a preemptive press conference to spin the report's contents, repeating Trump's favorite phrase, no collusion, and making excuses for the president like this.

As the special counsel's report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.

Okay, so, first of all, Donald Trump has never once in his life been motivated by a sincere belief.

1, the icy howling winds swirling in the yawning chasm of pitch blackness where his soul should be.

And 2, the hopeless pursuit of the only woman he truly loves.

And when you look at his presidency this way, it's actually quite romantic.

And also, if I may quote the advice that Alec Baldwin's attorney gives his client, being angry is not the same thing as being innocent.

And that wasn't the only thing that Barr said that in the wake of actually reading the report, seems laughably and willfully misleading.

The White House fully cooperated with the special counsel's investigation.

The president took no act that in fact deprived the special counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.

But that is, at best, a gross mischaracterization of what the report actually said, because full cooperation would have involved sitting down for an interview, which Trump did not do.

And Mueller not only found Trump's written answers inadequate, he also wrote that he...

Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what Barr said.

It's like Barr summarized the Twilight novels as, a girl in Florida goes to third base with a Wookiee.

I'm not even sure we're reading the same underlying material.

I've read the real book, where a dog man falls in love with a baby.

Look, look, all of this is clearly very depressing, and there's still so much that we don't know.

There are significant redactions within the report, as well as references to 14 investigations that Mueller handed off to other prosecutors, 12 of which remain secret.

And that can make this feel a little anticlimactic, especially because, ever since Barr's summary came out, the Trump administration's been taking an unearned victory lap.

The idea that any of us, and me as a campaign manager, would cheat, steal, lie, cut corners, talk to Russians, was an insult from the beginning.

An insult would be to say that Kellyanne Conway died many years ago and is now a skin suit occupied and operated by 300 rats who've evolved the ability to lie.

A fact is that the Mueller report explicitly shows Trump and his associates doing many of the things that she just listed.

Because here's the important thing to remember.

The report only vindicates the administration on their own false premises.

A year ago, we pointed out that Trump and his team were trying to center the narrative on collusion, despite the fact that that term has no specific legal meaning in criminal law.

But by reframing the investigation that way, Trump ensured that anything short of Mueller publishing 400 pages of text messages between him and Putin gaming out election fraud meant the whole thing was a complete waste of time.

So, Mueller's report did not find collusion and wasn't trying to because that word doesn't even apply here, and it didn't establish that Trump's team was part of a criminal conspiracy to interfere with the election.

Because just consider what we learned or had confirmed this week.

Russia interfered in our election and made efforts to help Trump win.

While, and while his campaign did not provably cooperate with Russia, they seemed eager to accept their help in a way that no 1 should be comfortable with.

Also, Trump may have obstructed justice, and If he didn't, it might only be because people who work for him ignored his orders.

And on top of all of this, the Attorney General, the nation's top law enforcement official, has proven himself to be a dishonest hack.

And I'm not saying that any of that is good news, but it is definitely good that we know about it.

The point is, having the knowledge that the Mueller report provides is infinitely better than the alternative, because that knowledge can inform Congress going forward, and crucially, voters, a year and a half from now.

And the alternative is for America to end up like Michael Cohen.

Perpetually confused, easily manipulated, and never fully understanding how a guy with a full-time job as a press secretary can also be such a max-jacked, certifiable meat king.


Speaker 0: -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ We begin tonight, obviously, with the major news of the week. The dramatic release of 1 man's painstaking work and the impact it may have on history. -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ -♪♪ -♪♪ That's right. It's Queen Elizabeth's 93rd birthday today, and that guy just fucking nailed it. But obviously, there was 1 other major story this week concerning the latest installment in the ongoing saga that we've been calling Stupid Watergate.

Basically, Watergate, but if Nixon had been kicked in the head by a billy goat, and also if that billy goat had been the White House chief of staff. And the reason we're talking about this is that on Thursday, the Mueller report was finally released. It was over 400 pages long, and many in the media chose to make a feature of processing it in plain sight. MSNBC had Ari Melber reading it in the corner of the studio, as if relegated to the kids' table, while New York 1 aired 30 uninterrupted seconds of their printer getting ready to print the report out. But, once the Mueller report had actually been read, it became clear that there was a lot in it.

Speaker 1: Mueller confirmed that Russia interfered in our election, made repeated contacts with Trump associates, but did not conclude that the Trump team engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia.

Speaker 2: But the report said several actions by the president were investigated as potentially amounting to obstruction of justice. Mueller's team says, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.

Speaker 0: And that last 1 is a pretty conspicuous non-exoneration. If you were interviewing a job applicant and they told you, just so you know, I wasn't found guilty of fucking my neighbor's mailboxes, but I also specifically wasn't found innocent. You would not necessarily rule them out, but you definitely think twice about hiring them. And some of the details in this report were incredible.

Speaker 3: When Trump learned that special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, he slumped back in his chair and said, Oh, my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm effed.

Speaker 0: Fucked. He said, -"I'm fucked." And... -$TIME OUT And while we obviously don't know whether Trump will face any repercussions from this report, I'd like to just live for a little longer in the moment of him saying, This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked. In fact, I'd like to take some artistic license to fully paint that scene for you.

Trump, upon learning Robert Mueller was appointed, slumping back in his chair. Meanwhile, Ivanka is playing fetch with Don Jr. Eric's tongue is stuck to a somehow frozen flagpole. Ryan's previous is walking around with his head inside a honeypot. Jared is standing motionless directly in front of a blank wall.

Steve Bannon is stress-eating a bowl of used syringes. And Stephen Miller is gleefully pulling the legs off a spider. While Trump says those beautiful words as tears roll down his cheeks, this is the end of my presidency, I'm fucked. And right at that very moment, a pigeon flies into the room and shits in his mouth. It is a masterpiece.

And, And I'm not saying that that's what happened. I'm just saying we don't definitively know that it didn't. And look, look, we clearly can't cover everything in the report tonight. So instead, I'd like to concentrate on 2 key factors that may have saved the president here. Incompetence when it comes to conspiracy with Russia, and disobedience when it comes to obstruction of justice.

So let's start with incompetence, meaning, let's start with Michael Cohen. Because the report spells out that Cohen was in contact with Russians through much of the campaign, mostly concerning Trump's efforts to build a tower in Moscow, which in and of itself is already wildly inappropriate. It is clearly compromising for a presidential candidate to be asking for business favors from a hostile foreign government. But from the very beginning, Cohen was laughably inept. At 1 point, he reached out to Putin's press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, but couldn't get through.

It turns out, that's because he meant to email PRPeskova at PRPress.gov, but actually emailed .gof instead. And .gof, of course, sends you right to the server for the new HBO series, Game of Flounder, where powerful Flounder families fight for control of the 7 sandbars. It starts in June. This network is fucked. And another, Another even more ridiculous case of Cohen bungling contact with Russians involved Dmitry Klokov, a former press secretary to Russia's energy minister.

Klokov's ex-wife had contacted Ivanka, offering his assistance to the Trump campaign. So, that is someone with ties to the Russian government offering help to elect Trump. Ivanka forwarded that email to Cohen, who Googled Dmitry Klokoff, and concluded that the person they must be talking about was a former Olympic weightlifter by that name, a man who has videos online like this. -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ -♪

Speaker 1: Whoa!

Speaker 0: ♪ -♪ -♪

Speaker 1: Who's gonna take it? ♪ -♪ -♪ Who's gonna take it? ♪ -♪ -♪ Who's gonna take it?

Speaker 0: ♪ -♪ Cohen apparently saw that and thought, well, I definitely got the right Dmitry Klokov. Apparently, Russia's Energy Minister's Press Secretary is completely jacked. And good for you, bruh. Hustle for that muscle. Soar today, strong tomorrow.

Am I right? Get swole, feed the soul. From 1 beef towel to another, respect. -♪ Respect. -♪

Speaker 1: LAUGHTER AND

Speaker 0: APPLAUSE And from all appearances, the real Klokoff kept trying to set up a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin. But Cohen basically blew that proposal off, which may not be surprising, given that, even during his interviews with Mueller, Cohen still appeared to believe that the Klokoff he spoke with was the Olympic weightlifter. And of course he was confused. He was probably still trying to figure out why deceased German ice hockey goalie Robert Muller wanted to speak with him in the first place. And it wasn't just Cohen.

The report found multiple instances where people tied to the Russian government offered Trump's campaign assistance, and in some instances, the campaign was receptive. But the thing that seemed to stop closer coordination from happening was often cartoonish levels of disorganization and incompetence. On top of which, there were times when the Trump team's ignorance of basic legal concepts seems to have actively helped shield them from criminal liability. Most notably, when it came to the infamous Trump Tower meeting featuring Don Jr., Jared, Paul Manafort, and a Russian offering more dirt.

Speaker 4: Mueller's team concluded, it would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful.

Speaker 0: Yeah, that kind of makes sense, doesn't it? It is gonna be hard to prove that this guy had general knowledge that his conduct could be breaking the law, or that he had general knowledge of anything at all, other than what it feels like to watch flags get more hugs from your dad than you get if you live to be a thousand. So, so, so when it comes to conspiracy, Trump's saving grace may have been that, despite Russians wanting to help, everyone around him was too inept to work with them. So as for the other major question in Mueller's report, obstruction of justice, Trump's saving grace there may have been that, despite ample evidence that he tried to do it, everyone around him was too disobedient to listen.

Speaker 5: The report paints a remarkable portrait of the president as a man obsessed with the Russia investigation, trying to seize control of the inquiry through his White House aides. It highlights at least 10 current and former administration officials or associates who did not carry out his orders.

Speaker 0: Wow. The news that the president ordered subordinates to do things that might constitute obstruction, and then they just ignored him, is both reassuring and also terrifying. That's like hearing your spouse say, you don't have to worry about the snake because the baby killed it. Well, hold on! I'm glad the snake is dead, but that means there was a fucking snake in there.

And it also means our baby has snake-killing strength. I'm sorry, there's a lot to process here. I'm happy, I'm relieved, but I'm also angry and confused. You're throwing a lot of shit at me. -$1.5 MILLION And there are multiple instances of people ignoring the president's instructions, like when Trump asked Corey Lewandowski to send his attorney general a message.

Speaker 6: The president gave him orders to tell the attorney general, then Jeff Sessions, to curtail the scope of the Russia investigation. Now Lewandowski, according to the report, never followed through on it, attempting to pass it off to another aide who did also not follow through on what the president instructed.

Speaker 0: So that's a chain of 2 people failing to follow through on a demand from the president. And it didn't stop there because that aide then passed Trump's order off to an assistant who opened the window and

Speaker 1: shouted it to a groundskeeper

Speaker 0: who wrote it down and taped it to a Roomba that was passing by, which drove itself straight into the river. Because this isn't why it got into government. --LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE --Although the most shocking example of the president being ignored involved former White House counsel Don McGahn. Trump apparently called and directed him to have Mueller removed as special counsel. McGahn refused, but Trump kept pushing until finally this happened.

Speaker 7: Instead of carrying out Trump's request, McGahn decided he would quit instead. Quote, he called his lawyer, drove to the White House, packed up his office, prepared to submit a resignation letter with his chief of staff, told Reince Priebus that the president has asked him to do crazy blank, and informed Priebus and Bannon that he was leaving.

Speaker 0: Holy fucking blank! -'Cause I'm not leaving. -'Cause I'm not leaving. Preparing to quit because you're being asked to do crazy shit isn't what you expect from the White House counsel. It's what you expect from Nicolas Cage's personal assistant.

No, Nicolas! I'm not constructing a ten-foot voodoo doll of you out of rare gemstones and dead crows. I have a master's degree! This is crazy shit, Nicholas! It's crazy shit!

And look, you might take some reassurance from the fact that so many of the people in Trump's orbit did not do as he asked. But the worrying thing is, lots of those people are gone now. And the newer figures seem very much on the same page as the president. Just look at how the report was released. Not only did Trump's Attorney General, William Barr, vastly downplay its contents in his letter summarizing it to Congress, but he also gave a preemptive press conference to spin the report's contents, repeating Trump's favorite phrase, no collusion, and making excuses for the president like this.

Speaker 8: As the special counsel's report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.

Speaker 0: Okay, so, first of all, Donald Trump has never once in his life been motivated by a sincere belief. He's motivated by 2 things only. 1, the icy howling winds swirling in the yawning chasm of pitch blackness where his soul should be. And 2, the hopeless pursuit of the only woman he truly loves. And when you look at his presidency this way, it's actually quite romantic.

And also, if I may quote the advice that Alec Baldwin's attorney gives his client, being angry is not the same thing as being innocent. And that wasn't the only thing that Barr said that in the wake of actually reading the report, seems laughably and willfully misleading.

Speaker 8: The White House fully cooperated with the special counsel's investigation. The president took no act that in fact deprived the special counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.

Speaker 0: But that is, at best, a gross mischaracterization of what the report actually said, because full cooperation would have involved sitting down for an interview, which Trump did not do. And Mueller not only found Trump's written answers inadequate, he also wrote that he... Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what Barr said. It's like Barr summarized the Twilight novels as, a girl in Florida goes to third base with a Wookiee. No!

No! That's not what happened. I'm not even sure we're reading the same underlying material. I've read the real book, where a dog man falls in love with a baby. Respect the text.

Honor the written word. Look, look, all of this is clearly very depressing, and there's still so much that we don't know. There are significant redactions within the report, as well as references to 14 investigations that Mueller handed off to other prosecutors, 12 of which remain secret. And that can make this feel a little anticlimactic, especially because, ever since Barr's summary came out, the Trump administration's been taking an unearned victory lap.

Speaker 9: The idea that any of us, and me as a campaign manager, would cheat, steal, lie, cut corners, talk to Russians, was an insult from the beginning.

Speaker 0: But was it, though? Was it? An insult would be to say that Kellyanne Conway died many years ago and is now a skin suit occupied and operated by 300 rats who've evolved the ability to lie. That's an insult. That's what an insult is.

A fact, however... A fact is that the Mueller report explicitly shows Trump and his associates doing many of the things that she just listed. Because here's the important thing to remember. The report only vindicates the administration on their own false premises. A year ago, we pointed out that Trump and his team were trying to center the narrative on collusion, despite the fact that that term has no specific legal meaning in criminal law.

But by reframing the investigation that way, Trump ensured that anything short of Mueller publishing 400 pages of text messages between him and Putin gaming out election fraud meant the whole thing was a complete waste of time. So, Mueller's report did not find collusion and wasn't trying to because that word doesn't even apply here, and it didn't establish that Trump's team was part of a criminal conspiracy to interfere with the election. But, it found a lot of other stuff. Because just consider what we learned or had confirmed this week. Russia interfered in our election and made efforts to help Trump win.

While, and while his campaign did not provably cooperate with Russia, they seemed eager to accept their help in a way that no 1 should be comfortable with. Also, Trump may have obstructed justice, and If he didn't, it might only be because people who work for him ignored his orders. And on top of all of this, the Attorney General, the nation's top law enforcement official, has proven himself to be a dishonest hack. And I'm not saying that any of that is good news, but it is definitely good that we know about it. The point is, having the knowledge that the Mueller report provides is infinitely better than the alternative, because that knowledge can inform Congress going forward, and crucially, voters, a year and a half from now.

And the alternative is for America to end up like Michael Cohen. Perpetually confused, easily manipulated, and never fully understanding how a guy with a full-time job as a press secretary can also be such a max-jacked, certifiable meat king.

Speaker 1: You You

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