All Of that extra black ink will make the 300 page report weigh 133% (700 pages) more.
Generally, yes. But pages and pages of black would excite Trump’s opponents, who would demand to have some high-clearance Dems look at the pages without the black bars so as to assess whether the redactions were for national security—or for protecting Donald.
So Barr might find it expedient to simply snip all the pages that have a lot of black, so as to avoid getting that ‘were these redactions partisan in nature?’ reaction.
Barr has now disclosed the report is nearly 400 pages, that he will release a redacted version by mid-April and Trump has “authorized” him to assert executive privilege on his, Trump’s, behalf. Which is weird, since it isn’t supposed to be up to Barr.
Congress is keeping the pressure on that Barr should release a fully unredacted version by April 2nd. They attribute Barr’s capitulation to ongoing public and congressional pressure, so let’s keep up the good work. 
A recent poll shows 75% of the public wants to see the full report excluding only classified information and grand jury proceedings.
Well, thump is incapable of doing it himself for oh so many reasons… beginning with the fact that he’d have to READ something longer than a paragraph, and know a few bigly words, and keep his mind on a topic longer than his 10-second attention span. Not to mention holding such a vewwy, vewwy big book in his tiny hands. Although, I suppose he could get it downloaded onto his phone.
Lol, Putin gets the Mueller report before Americans, then.
Since this is a discussion regaring outcomes, there is, in fact, a non-zero probability that the Mueller investigation leads to show trials and imprisonment for prominent Trump opponents.
Maybe Barr could send the report to Trump via Twitter. That could possibly keep Trump occupied for the rest of his term. More likely though is that he has Ivanka read it to him at night as a bedtime story: How brave Sir Donald defeated the evil liberals and their witch hunt.
As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show last night, Barr’s latest letter to Congress emphasized that his 4 page summary he had given last Sunday was not a summary of the Mueller report itself, but merely “a summary of it’s ‘principle conclusions’ - that is, its bottom line”. To me this sounds a lot like he is setting the stage for the details of the report to be considerably more damaging to the President (and trying to immunize himself against claims that his summary was deceiving in not including any of these).
I’m not necessarily a fanboy of Barr, but I don’t see evidence that he’s necessarily politicizing the report or that he’s trying to bury it. I think he understands that he has to release the substance of what’s contained in Mueller’s conclusions, as well as a lot of the investigative findings. Moreover, if Barr were trying to protect Trump, I think the wise thing to do would be to release as much as he possibly can at once and be done with it. The slow drip of information would be worse. With one damaging revelation leading to demands for more of the report to be released, that would be a situation that would be better for both Trump and AG Barr to avoid. Get it out in the open, let the media decide what the talking points are, and let the storm blow through town and move on.
When was the last time a Republican did something wise?
Good question.
Now if you want to talk about their low animal cunning, that’s different.
In general, a slow drip is better for Trump. It inoculates everyone by slowly feeding them things they can rationalize away (if they’re of a mind to). Most people can’t remember much past two weeks ago. Unless you’re able to get enough evidence all together under that mark, all previous evidence goes poof.
Just leaked! Screenshotsof the report as Barr plans to release it to Congress. National Security and grand jury material redacted. Also anything that makes thump out to be a criminal.
Actually, I disagree with you on this. Let’s assume that the bottom line is what Barr has claimed, that Mueller has found that whatever evidence there was of collusion did not rise to the level of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. By releasing only the bottomline conclusion, while holding back on all the damaging details of what actually did occur, Barr has allowed the predominant narrative to be that Trump was essentially exonerated (even though Barr quoted that Mueller specifically said that he couldn’t exonerate Trump on the obstruction of justice charge) and has put Democrats on the defensive.
Now, subsequently, when the details become available and they look much more damaging to Trump, the usually suspects will be able to claim that none of these details changes the final conclusion that Mueller reached…and hence will be able to convince all but the most motivated people to skip reading the report (or even listening to more details about it) and hence learning more about these details.
I think that if this is indeed how the report shakes out, Barr’s strategy will have turned out to be pretty f-ing brilliant.
Let’s see if I follow your logic. Let’s say that I’m not one of the ‘most motivated people’ (whoever they are), but I am an interested American citizen. 3 or 4 details are released that look bad for Trump. But because the Usual Suspects (whoever they are) say that these details don’t matter, because Barr already exonerated the President, I should no longer pay attention to further details?
Perhaps that might be true of the typical Fox News viewer, but I certainly wouldn’t stop paying attention because some TV commentator told me that it wasn’t worth my time. And I don’t think the majority of the interested citizenry will stop either.
I reminded of the story about Adlai Stevenson:
Sure, people with sufficient motivation will read it. But, I don’t think that many of the swing voters necessarily fall into that category. (Or maybe we are not even talking about swing voters…The Pres is safe from impeachment…or at least a subsequent trial in the Senate…unless there starts to be some serious abandonment of him by at least some of his softer supporters.)
If so, then hot holy early Christmas. If everything’s redacted, it means that much stuff is still in the pipeline. The more the better.
(I’m pretty sure that was a joke, but then I play the straight man in real life, so what do I know?)
Must be tough trying to serve the public and your (highly) imperfect master at the same time.