Notes on the Mueller Report: A Reading Diary

by Benjamin Wittes

Originally published on www.lawfareblog.com, Brookings Senior Fellow and legal analyst Benjamin Wittes, reads the 448-page Mueller report carefully, and wrote his thoughts as he progressed.

Audible Audio

Published June 6, 2019

About the author

Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. He co-founded and co-writes the influential Lawfare blog (http://www.lawfareblog.com/), which is devoted to non-ideological discussion of the "Hard National Security Choices,” and is a member of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law. Between 1997 and 2006, he served as an editorial writer for The Washington Post specializing in legal affairs. His writing has also appeared in a wide range of journals and magazines. Benjamin Wittes was born November 5, 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, and graduated from Oberlin College in 1990. He recently earned a black belt in taekwondo.

Reviews

[Meghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was incredibly helpful and clarified a lot of Vol II (the obstruction part, not the collaboration with Russia part) for me— particularly what evidence would be important in a criminal case (obstruction of justice) vs what evidence would be important for impeachment articles (abuse of power of the office, conduct of the president). I honestly was reading this thinking that it all seemed like such a brazen abuse of power that Congress could impeach Trump on the whole lot, so I appreciated the very clear distinction for each section.

Wittes also makes it perfectly clear that even though this is a report on a criminal investigation, the inability to charge a sitting president with a crime means that all of this evidence of criminal obstruction would have to wait until Trump is no longer in office. Which means the most important thing now is the evidence that supports impeachment.