The Report (Vol One, Complete): “Doing a Business.”

In which Team Mueller paints a portrait of a campaign rife with imbecilic, overconfident menchildren playing politics and seeking to seek opportunities to impress the boss, a cadre of Vincent Adultmen “doing a business” on an international / geopolitical stage – with coffee and donuts and notes scrawled upon yellow legal pads just in view of the camera to show that they are doing so many businesses, in the worst traditions of hotel banquet hall networking events – that they were too inept to understand – though not, it would seem, too inept to “do a [sensitive and/or potentially illegal] business” either over encrypted apps or delete conversations pertinent to said “business”:

“Further, the Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated – including some associated with the Trump campaign – deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records.” – Vol. 1, p. 10

It continues…

“Accordingly, while this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible, given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.”

Thus, it would seem, in our age of loose (at best) definitions of “complete and total exoneration,” (the current bloviating rally cry of both Team Malignancy and its legislative enablers, a messaging predicated upon a cynical faith that people are too lazy to read the actual report) that willfull (?) stupidity coupled with the utiliziation of encrypted communications tools and/or the deletion of pertinent documentary evidence (for example, messages from before March 2017 were nowhere to be found on the phones of both Steve Bannon and Erik Prince; similarly, both claimed not to know why messages didn’t appear on their devices – Vol.1, p. 156) is, indeed, the sure-fire way out of anything.

Currently 50 pages or so into Volume Two: if Volume One was a surreal portrait of a campaign of imbeciles, Volume Two is a damning portrait of the mercurial degradation of the presidency; my highlighter is drying up, my sticky tab supply dwindling, my horror growing.