IT'S A RICO CASE:

1. This was as much a counterintelligence investigation as a criminal one. One of the new details in the report is that the FBI "embedded" approximately 40 personnel in the Special Counsel's Office. Their role was not to contribute to the criminal probe, but instead to pore over the collected materials and pass written summaries of key counterintelligence findings to FBI headquarters and other agencies across the country.

2. Jerome Corsi isn't out of the woods. One of the most surprising decisions at the close of the Mueller investigation was the lack of further indictments. But conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, at least, appears to still be very much in the sights of prosecutors. In fact, the very first mention of Corsi's name appears in a redaction labeled "Harm to Ongoing Matter." (We know that because we only see the "second" reference to Corsi's name appear in a paragraph on page 54 of the first volume of the report.) Elsewhere, Corsi's name is clearly hidden in other redactions, as context clues make clear he's the "ongoing matter" under question. [...]

4. The Trump campaign really wanted Hillary's emails. The role of Michael Flynn aide Peter Smith has long been unclear. Smith evidently tried to mount an effort in 2016 to find Hillary Clinton's stolen emails through the dark web, and later apparently killed himself days after the Wall Street Journal reported on those efforts in 2017. Mueller makes clear that Smith's actions were extensive, well-funded, and part of multiple initiatives by people connected to the Trump campaign to find Hillary's emails--all of which were then overtaken by the Russian theft and email dumps of DNC and Clinton campaign emails. [...]

9. Mueller goes to great lengths to demolish William Barr's theory of obstruction. One of the major overlooked sections of the report is the roughly 20-page portion--akin almost to a Harvard Law Review article--at the end, where Mueller's team makes clear how vigorously they disagree with attorney general William Barr's controversial memo last year. At the time, Barr argued that the obstruction statute doesn't apply to the president. It's easy to imagine Mueller team member Michael Dreeben, perhaps the Justice Department's best appellate lawyer, laboring long and hard over pages 159 to 181 of Volume II. The report argues that the idea that the president can't obstruct justice "is contrary to the litigating position of the Department of Justice and is not supported by principles of statutory construction."

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