Waiting in Vain for the Mueller Report

Bob Woodward’s Fear was a blockbuster. Michelle Obama’s Becoming was the best-selling book of 2018. But as far as prepublication buzz goes, neither of them can match the expectations attached to the Mueller report. No one knows when Special Counsel Robert Mueller will file a concluding document with the attorney general, or when all or part of it will be made public, but that hasn’t prevented a devoted sentinel watch.

But there’s a more fundamental question surrounding the report than when the document will land, which is whether it will even exist—or rather, whether it will exist in a form worth the anxious wait. Whether through wishful thinking about a report that could put the final nail in Donald Trump’s political coffin or expectations created by the famous (or infamous) Starr Report in 1998, the unspoken assumption has been that