Okay, we’re starting to put together the beginnings of a tally, which you can see below. Letters after a Reps name are the initials of the TPM Readers who spoke to their offices. Gist so far is that pretty few are changing their position explicitly. But the key is that most GOP Reps are still saying they support releasing the report but then getting squishy about when. This of course can mean in six months or two years. So these are clearly trying to give room for Barr to pursue his run out the clock until January 2021. Read More

[This post will be updated and re-timestamped through the day.]

Our situation now seems pretty clear. The administration plan is this: Release the Barr Letter and use it as a cudgel to claim bogus exoneration and threaten revenge against the President’s perceived enemies while Bill Barr tries to run down the clock until January 2021.

Read More

Here’s the letter where Barr lays out his timeline. Read More

We’re still trying to make sense of this letter. It’s ambiguous on a few key points. But there’s one highly relevant thing that seems clear. Attorney General Barr plans to give the extensively redacted version of the Report to Congress too. So Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi et al., will only get to see a version of the report that has been extensively redacted under four broad categories. Read More

Simple point on the day’s events. The only legitimate way this concludes is for Congress or some subsection of Congress to get the complete and un-redacted Mueller Report. Full stop. Precedent is on the side of this approach. The Congress also have various models to accommodate. It can be released only to the committees of jurisdiction. It can be released only to the Gang of Eight, though that strikes me as far too restrictive. It can of course be released to the entire Congress, which seems most reasonable. What redactions are included in the publicly released Mueller Report is something reasonable people can disagree over. But as long as the substance of the redactions remain secret from the Congress the whole thing is illegitimate. If the redactions of the public version are reasonable we need members of the opposition party to confirm that that is the case. We need leadership of both chambers to confirm that. This is shaping up to give Bill Barr broad latitude to hide all the details that President Trump wants kept secret.

When I was away my main goal was to relax and bury myself in books. In particular I returned to a long time interest: the origins of the business of movable type printing and its transformative effect not only on the way people consumed information and also the way they formed their collective identity – an amorphous thing that is highly tied to communities of people both consuming the same information and being collectively aware that they are exposed to or consuming the same information. I have long been interested in this period – the late 15th and early 16th centuries – because a cluster of epochally consequential events happen over no more than two or three generations. The significance of some are more clear than others. But over time they will interweave into and catalyze each other, magnifying the significance of each by their interactions.

Consider some key examples. (In some cases I use approximate dates when the precise event is murky, amorphous or incremental.) Read More

Neither here nor there in the big scheme of things. But I thought some of you might find this interesting. On Friday I encouraged TPM Readers to reach out to their members of Congress to find out their current position on the release of the Mueller Report. Here’s the post. Here’s the DIY running tally I was doing through the early afternoon. I’ve suspended that effort for the moment the Second Barr Letter has changed the state of play significantly. I explain where I think we are here. But as part of that effort I used a new part of our system to send a note (an email) to all 29,265 TPM members to let you know what we were doing because I thought time was of the essence and it was a particularly important moment. Read More

We all know that great swathes of the web are simply garbage – absurd listicles, the detritus of content farms living a zombie existence, abandoned social networks, virtually everything on Twitter. It all has some fascinating value in the future just as scientists and historians learn things from the actual physical garbage of the past. But one of the amazing things about the Internet is that in addition to all the garbage and trash the web contains almost limitless different niches of treasures. One of the ones I’m continually bowled over by is the digitization of archival material in the world’s great archives and research libraries. Take the British Museum or the British Library or the Library of Congress or countless other repositories around the world. Sure, they all have websites, which tell you some information about their holdings. But one of the great projects (multitudes of programs) over the last thirty years is the digitization and digital publication of a great swathe of the historical riches of global civilization. Read More

In a battlefield situation the difference between a successful lightning strike into enemy lines and one that strikes deep and then becomes surrounded, cut off and destroyed can come down to a matter of moments. Since a short time after Bill Barr released the First Barr Letter I’ve thought we were looking at something like the latter case.

Bill Barr was installed at the Justice Department to protect the President. His carefully worded letter appeared to do just that. The President declared complete and total vindication and exoneration. All his supporters have rushed to do the same, creating a wild chorus of cheers, demanding Democrats resign, piling on the President’s demands for retribution. Many Democrats, like getting sucker punched two or three times, were stunned and demoralized. Read More

Don’t worry. President Trump says he’ll have a health care plan that’s even better than Obamacare “right after the election.”