Kelly Hawes: Why bother reading the Mueller report?

<p>Yoni Applebaum, senior editor for politics at The Atlantic magazine, had an interesting reaction to the furor surrounding the end of the special counsel’s investigation.</p><p>“A little jealous of everyone who’s been able to figure out exactly what’s in the Mueller Report and form strong opinions about it before a single complete sentence has been publicly released,” he said on Twitter.</p><p>Even before Attorney General William Barr had delivered his four-page summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to Congress, Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, was declaring winners and losers of what he seemed to view as a failed coup.</p><p>Among the losers he identified were The New York Times, CNN, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Hillary Clinton. Among the winners were democracy, 2016 voters and President Donald J. Trump.</p><p>Not surprisingly, an online survey sponsored by CNN found opinions on the investigation split along party lines. While 77 percent of Republicans felt the president had been exonerated, 80 percent of Democrats said he had not. Independents were more closely divided, with 58 percent siding with the Democrats.</p><p>For evidence of the chasm dividing our country, we need look no further than a single household, that of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and her husband, George Conway III.</p><p>Appearing on “Fox &amp;amp; Friends,” Kellyanne Conway urged consequences for anyone who had claimed to have evidence of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia.</p><p>“Those who let this lie fly for two years, haranguing and harassing and trying to embarrass, and worse, those of us who worked on the 2016 campaign, beginning with the president and his family, really do owe America an apology,” she said. “But more importantly, they never legitimized him as president, because they never saw it coming. And those who have now spent 22 months wasting their time, really two-and-a-half years since the day he was elected, are now running out of time for 2020.”</p><p>Her husband had a decidedly different take, noting Mueller had gone out of his way to say the report did not exonerate the president.</p><p>“Mueller didn’t have to say that,” George Conway observed in a column in The Washington Post. “Indeed, making that very point, the president’s outside counsel, Rudolph W. Giuliani, called the statement a ‘cheap shot.’ But Mueller isn’t prone to cheap shots; he plays by the rules, every step of the way. If his report doesn’t exonerate the president, there must be something pretty damning in it about him, even if it might not suffice to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.”</p><p>That CNN survey found nearly six in 10 respondents saying Congress should have a full airing of the special counsel’s findings. Of course, those findings aren’t likely to change many minds.</p><p>A combined 86 percent of respondents said they already had decided how they would vote in the 2020 election. Just 13 percent said the report would have any impact on their decision.</p><p>If talk surrounding the report has proved anything, it’s this: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been right in her approach to the many controversies surrounding the president. After Barr’s letter was released, Pelosi urged fellow Democrats not to follow the example set by Republicans.</p><p>“Be calm. Take a deep breath. Don’t become like them,” she said. “We have to handle this professionally, officially, patriotically, strategically.”</p><p>Democrats in Congress should continue their oversight, but they should also remain focused on the bread-and-butter issues that brought them a congressional majority in 2018.</p><p>And they should leave the decision on the president’s fate where it belongs. In the hands of voters.</p>