Senate Democrats may have complained Wednesday that the “Mueller Report” was unavailable, perhaps part of a secret Trump administration plan to hide the special counsel’s filings, but some consumers are getting their hands on copies; the Mueller report will debut this week at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list.
CNN reports that The Washington Post’s version of the report, which features not just Mueller’s text but commentary and analysis from Washington Post reporters, tops both the “paperback nonfiction” and “combined print/e-book sales” lists.
The paperback report, which is redacted, costs around $9 for the print edition and around $7 for the e-book version.
A second version of the same document, without annotations but with an introduction by legendary legal analyst Alan Dershowitz, also debuted this week on the same paperback bestseller list, but at number 11. That version is a little less expensive, but the Mueller report there is reproduced with commentary only at the beginning and not throughout.
Other versions of the report, including the Department of Justice’s official versions, went unranked. The DOJ version is available for less than $2. If you go to the Department of Justice’s website, you can download a PDF of the report at no cost (though it will take some time as the report is several hundred pages long).
CNN theorizes that the Mueller report is rising to the top of the NYT bestseller list this week because of a “resurgence” of interest in the document spurred on by a Wednesday Senate hearing involving acting Attorney General William Barr, who testified about his role in making the report’s findings public. In the Wednesday hearings, Democrats repeatedly referred to the report as unavailable, overly redacted, and late, even going so far as to accuse Barr of deliberately withholding the report from the public.
Barr ultimately defended his handling of the report, and noted repeatedly that Democrats’ complaints about his letters about and summaries of the Mueller report were moot now that the report was widely available. The Democrats objected, claiming that without seeing a non-redacted version of the Mueller report, it was impossible to know whether information was deliberately being withheld by the Justice Department.
According to Politico, two Republicans, Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), have seen a non-redacted version of the Mueller report and contend that the redactions have no bearing on the report’s conclusions, and that certain redacted passages can be decoded by reading the full report.
“It didn’t change anything,” Collins told media. “Some of the redactions could actually be implied from other parts of the report that were not redacted.”
Graham added that after viewing the document, “nothing changed” for him.
House Democrat Jerry Nadler (D-NJ) has demanded that the Department of Justice turn over a non-redacted version of the report to all legislators, particularly those Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. Nadler has given the DOJ an arbitrary deadline of May 15 to produce both the report and the trove of information Special Counsel Robert Mueller used to reach his conclusions.
Until then, though, Democrats will have to get their reports where everyone else is getting them: Amazon.
