A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America

by Philip Rucker

The week of April 8, Washington was in a state of panicky anticipation for the release of Robert Mueller’s report. For the past couple of weeks, Justice Department officials had been carefully redacting portions of the 448-page document, but the public version was expected to drop imminently. Reporters were being told by their sources to be on standby. Trump and his lawyers were being told the same. They had been wrestling with a major decision—whether to read the report before it became public. The normal answer for any attorney representing a client was a resounding yes. But Trump had to consider his lawyers’ fear that his critics could accuse him of getting the attorney general to redact portions that were particularly embarrassing to him before the document was publicly released. “He could have said at any time, ‘I want to see the report.’ He didn’t do that,” one of the team members recalled about the president. “Everybody involved in that process was very concerned that Mueller’s report and the attorney general’s review and summary or release was viewed as being allowed to proceed without intervention. We wanted it to be clean. We didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to say we are sticking our fingers in.” On the other hand, Trump’s legal team knew Mueller had delivered a monster of a document, which they jokingly called “a son of Starr report,” a reference to the 211-page document on Clinton investigations released in 1998 by independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The si...