The Redacted Mueller Report
I started reading it when it 4 hours after it came out. I&#x27;m only ~40 pages in but here&#x27;s my view of things so far.<p>1. The report doesn&#x27;t release any new bombshells. But that doesn&#x27;t really make Trump look good because there&#x27;s a lot of existing controversies.<p>2. Anyone who uses the word collusion from now on obviously didn&#x27;t make it to page 2. Collusion is not a defined legal term. Muller specifically states this and further states that he looked very specifically for evidence that members of the Trump campaign coordinated knowingly with representative&#x27;s of Russia. Merely being aware of Russia&#x27;s efforts and making decisions based on awareness of Russia was not a crime per se. The key word to look for to identify people who actually read the thing is &quot;coordination&quot;.<p>3. Some Trump campaign officials did give material support to IRA efforts such as giving them campaign signs and materials. However there is no evidence that any US person knew they were interacting with a foreign agent. The IRA posed as US citizens and used stolen identities.<p>4. The IRA had a shockingly wide reach. 126 million people viewed their content. The IRA is estimated to have spent 100k USD boosting their posts on social media. Basically Facebook the product works as intended. Yes Russia used it and yes it was illegal. But the real frightening thing here is the extent to which social media gives the illusion of being an open forum of opinions when the reality is that the thoughts and views the public gets to see (and adopt for themselves) are completely sold to the highest bidder. Social media as news is a societal mistake and Russia exploiting this problem doesn&#x27;t mean Russia made this problem.<p>5. Intelligence services can amplify convenient political movements but cannot make them out of thin air. This is true of the CIA when people blame them for their countries problems and it is true of the GRU as well. Russia&#x27;s influence campaign consisted of organizing rallies and buying political ads. These things are only crimes because they were done by a foreign intelligence service.<p>6. Russia also tried to amplify Bernie Sander&#x27;s campaign. It is unclear if Trump&#x2F;Sanders have some policy &#x2F; ideology that was amenable to Russian interests or if Russia was simply amplifying whichever candidate it thought would be generally bad for America.<p>7. Manafort was pushing for Trump to offer&#x2F;recognize a peace proposal between Russia&#x2F;Ukraine in the event that he wins. In Manaforts own words this peace proposal was a back door for Russia to control East Ukraine. If Manafort isn&#x27;t a Russian asset serving Russian geopolitical interests then I don&#x27;t know what is.<p>8. The GRU paid for servers in Arizona as a launch point for their hacks on the DNC&#x2F;DCCC. Russia obfuscated their ownership by paying with bitcoins that they obtained by mining. This sort of money laundering is par for course for an intelligence agency (see also: CIA and Iran-Contra). The investigative method is redacted but I strongly suspect blockchain analysis.<p>9. The US knows a fair amount about Russian hacking tools and agents and likely has a sophisticated counter-measure operation. Most of the redacted stuff had to do with known persons or assets. I expect a raid at some point in the future.<p>10. The obstruction part is in volume II. I&#x27;m not there yet but I&#x27;ve heard some spoilers. Apparently this part is more damning.<p>11. The pundits had something to say about the report way too fast to have possibly read it. I happened to be visiting a nursing home that day and as you might imagine, Fox news is quite popular with the older demographic. One of the usual blowhards was loudly informing me what Democrats think of the report (allegedly mad because it exhonerate&#x27;s Trump). Just on the timing alone it should have been clear that this guy didn&#x27;t read it yet, Democrat&#x27;s hadn&#x27;t read it yet, Democrat&#x27;s didn&#x27;t have an opinion yet, and this pundit couldn&#x27;t have possibly interviewed any Democrat&#x27;s to figure out what they think of it yet. Still here he was and the viewers were nodding along in agreement and remarking how on point this guy was. Clearly certain news sources had their story written long before the report even came out. It still gives me whiplash that Trumpians can bash the media in one breath and then go on to consume obvious fictitious reporting in the next. We live in a world where it shouldn&#x27;t be possible to lie like this because the report is there for anyone to see it. Instead people are willfully ignorant and tune into whichever summary fits their priors. Chomsky missed the 6th filter: the viewers themselves.<p>11.1 In the coming days, Trump tweets and other right wing media are going to convince 40% of the country that the report says whatever they want it to say. Yesterdays NY Post headline read &quot;No Collusion, No Obstruction.&quot; A ton of people are going to read the headline and not any further. This is our post-truth reality and I hate it.