After the better part of two years, the "Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference Into The 2016 Presidential Election" (better known as the Mueller report) has finally been made public. Most of it, anyway...roughly a third of the pages had something redacted. There's been a ton of reaction from people all over the political spectrum, but it's amazing to me how little is being said about preventing it from happening again.
The report came in two parts: volume one talks about impact on the 2016 election by Russian agents, and volume two is about attempted obstruction of justice by President Trump and his allies. That's an oversimplification but close enough for my purposes. A lot of what's in there is not new...a lot of the Russian interference stuff was already released in previous indictments, and you'd have to be hiding under a rock not to know of the many ways that Trump had been pushing back against the investigation. In both areas, the investigating team basically says that evidence exists but isn't enough to bring criminal charges against the President.
The reaction that I've seen, both in the media and anecdotally, has been largely split down party lines: Republicans are happy that Trump isn't going to court or (at least for now) being impeached; Democrats are upset about the exact same thing, complaining about those redacted sections and promising to continue to investigate. For his part, the President is, as usual, making grand exaggerations about how good this is for him.
Let's forget President Trump for a minute, difficult as that may be no matter which side of the aisle you happen to inhabit. Look at what the report is saying without coloring it with your feelings about the current administration, good or bad. A foreign power was able to impact a United States Presidential Election, in a significant enough way that criminal charges were brought against the foreign perpetrators. Then a President was able to place obstacles in the way of the investigation into that election interference, with enough evidence that the investigators could not exonerate him but not enough to lead to criminal charges.
Where is the great outcry from every United States citizen against a system which allows this to happen? Where are the lawmakers putting forward reform packages to combat the problem? I hear a lot of complaining - Trump supporters that he's being unfairly targeted, Trump opponents pushing for more investigation and possibly impeachment - but very little about fixing the system.
I suspect we're going to hear a lot about the Mueller report during the 2020 Presidential and Congressional elections over the next 18 months. I'm going to be much more inclined to listen when candidates leave aside the partisan rhetoric for or against Trump, and instead focus on how we prevent this travesty from happening again.
