Mueller Lite? Or Mueller Heavy?

Drawing via English Update.

Took a personal day to attend to some business, leaving a quarter-finished post on some boring topic or other, and spent a few hours not looking particularly at any news, and this thing happens in the most unsatisfying way it could, of course, with a notice that there are no further sealed or forthcoming indictments from the special counsel's office, which doesn't mean nobody else is going to get indicted—ongoing investigations by the various US attorneys' offices and state attorneys general will certainly yield something—but does mean that The Report or the Principal Conclusions we might be invited to look at this weekend probably don't include any statements of culpability on the part of Junior, Kushner, and the Emperor in particular; as Rosenstein has written,

"Punishing wrongdoers through judicial proceedings is only one part of the Department's mission.... We also have a duty to prevent the disclosure of information that would unfairly tarnish people who are not charged with crimes."

If they aren't charged, we won't learn about the stuff they aren't charged with.

On the other hand, attorney general William Barr notes, the report is specifically supposed to be a report "explaining the prosecution and declination decisions", meaning that it's supposed to explain why they decided not to prosecute some cases, and a confidential report, that is one that may disclose such matters on the understanding that they aren't intended for the public, and Ari Melber (I'm live-blogging TV at this point) suggests that what actually gets released is negotiable: Mueller's gig is over, but Barr will consult him (and Rosenstein, who seems to have put off his widely reported plans to leave DOJ for at least some weeks) as to what confidential information can be revealed, with a preference, at least that's what they're saying, for revealing more rather than less.

And the congressional chairs, most notably Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee and Jerry Nadler of Judiciary, are very determined.

There's this long list of questions that look like they aren't being resolved at this point, anyhow, starting with Trump's long series of lies about his Russian business interests—the Papadopoulos behaviors, the Manafort attempts to cash in on his relation to Trump, Junior and the 9 June meeting, the inexplicable anti-Ukraine Republican platform change, Kushner and the Erik Prince matter, Manafort and the Tony Fabrizio matter, Kushner and Trump and the Mike Flynn matter, the lies of so many Trump staffers about their Russian connections, Trump's in-plain-sight secret meetings with Kislyak and Lavrov and so many times Putin himself, the endless Trump efforts to defy Congress over Russia sanctions, and so on. Are we seriously not going to learn anything about these? Just not ready to believe that. But we're not learning it today.