Okay, here’s a niche joke for Mueller watchers…
When Congress finally get their hands on the full Mueller Report and release their own minimally-redacted version of it, what will the report have in common with Michael Cohen?
They will both have been disbarred.
Just to point out the flaw in the argument that Mark Meadows is making, in terms of trying to demonstrate that the investigation of the Trump campaign was unfounded:
He makes this statement, “What we would find is people within the department of justice primarily the FBI would actually give information to the media, then those reports would actually come out and they would say ‘Wow, we have these reports now,’ and then they would take the actual reports and use those as the probable cause to do a further investigation, […] It was a big circular reasoning.”
A circle has no input. You have specifically stated that information was given to the media, implying that there was information internal to the FBI and DOJ. All Mr. Meadows seems to be saying is that rather than giving the information which they already had, internally, to FISC, they laundered it back to themselves for some reason.
While that may be questionable and plausibly unethical (depending on the motivations and logic), it still means that at every stage, real information was being used and acted upon that started and ended with the facts available to the DOJ at that point of time. All you have said is that they chose to make at information available to the judge in a format less likely to encourage the judge to accept the bona fides of that Intel than if they’d simply spared themselves the extra step of laundering their own information back to themselves at each step.
Of course, that’s all supposing that his interpretation is correct. For all we know, he saw a bunch of redacted materials and, because the information in news articles is not redacted, that part stayed visible to Congress, making it seem more meaningful than it is. It may be that the original information from the DOJ was also directly given to FISC and that the news sources had very little importance. It’s also possible that Mr. Meadows is taking one or two known instances is leaking and simply making the assumption that everything was a leak when, actually, most of it wasn’t.
But either way, that’s a problem of leaks. Mr. Meadows and Trump seem to have a hard time understanding the difference between falsehoods and leaks. If it’s a leak, it’s true. If it’s a falsehood, it’s not a leak.
The way the “T” is bracketed in this quote from Barr is interesting. Anyone want to lay money down that the first word that was cut off in this sentence was either “Although” or “While”?:
“[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
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I think many people have spent many hours in deep cogitation about that bracketed “T”! 
It clearly indicates that that Mueller quote is only one part of a longer sentence. Maybe something like: "While the investigation found substantial evidence of collusion between persons in the Trump orbit and Russian citizens with suspected links to Russian intelligence services, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
If Barr is found to have seriously misled the public and distorted the overall report, I’m wondering what the backlash would be in terms of his credibility as AG. I think it would be hard for career lawyers at the DoJ to take him seriously going forward. They’d have no choice but take his title and rank seriously, but that’s about it.
The people who support Trump will still be fine with him. The people who don’t, likely never were. The people who could remove him are okay with him staying where he is. We need to stop thinking that Republicans can be shamed out of office.
Muller tea leaves: Mueller is back at his Washington office this morning. What could it all mean…?
Cleaning out his desk?
“… I know I put that pirated copy of the full report on a damn thumb drive somewhere…”
I wish Bill Burr was AG.
Even Aaron Burr would be an improvement.
MSNBC just reported that the Mueller report will be released to Congress and the public on Thursday.
They’ve said nothing about how much will be redacted but I suspect it will be a substantial amount.
The unfortunate reality is that much of the redactions will be centered on the national security aspects of the report which is the precise area where the potential for damage to trump is the greatest.
Barrbie
Not sure that I’d agree with that. I’m not sure what the exact ratio would be, but I would probably guess it will be split about 50/50. Mueller’s mandate was targeted in national security and Russia and foreign intelligence but, at the same time, we know that he found issues with everything from Stormy Daniels to (possibly) embezzlement of the inaugural ceremony funds to (possibly) insurance fraud to (possibly) money laundering to…
His focus was meant to be the one, but he probably started the investigations on a few dozen other cases. I mean, 1MDB is in there somewhere, the simple criminal stuff is likely to be vast. But so I would expect that it would relatively balance out, since there is no strong value in going into a terribly large amount of detail on the things that he decided it was better to just refer to the FBI for continued investigation.
But for the main focus of the report, sources and means are the only thing that need to be redacted. While that could be significant in places, it’s still something that you can accomplish by just blacking out a word or two in most cases.
With the criminal stuff, just the sheer existence of the investgation will, often, be secret so as not to disparage the potentially innocent (and so as to not forearn the guilty). I wouldn’t even expect section headings, it will just be whole pages of black. We’ll see Stormy Daniels and a few other things mentioned in the domestic, criminal activities section, but mostly it will be lots and lots of pages of rectangles.
While I’m not sure what the proportion of counterintelligence to criminality will be, I think it’s safe to say that it will be the counterintelligence section that is the less heavily redacted.
Raymond Burr.
How about Bill Burro. As in an ass.
Let’s just finish this one off:
A Burrito would be an improvement. 
And exactly why Congress should receive a fully unredacted version.
MSNBC: “Law professor Ryan Goodman tells Lawrence that in 1989, Barr refused to release a DOJ legal opinion, choosing to release a summary report instead. It was later revealed that Barr, according to Goodman, mischaracterized parts of the opinion in his summary. Lawrence also discusses with Ron Klain.” Link.