“Release the Report!”: Citizens rally for Mueller’s full report

On Thursday, April 4th, hundreds of demonstrators protested at the Boston Common in the late afternoon to call for the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to be released to the public.

Mueller’s report contains the findings of his investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election. The highly anticipated report was also expected to shed light on what the President Donald Trump and his campaign staff knew about possible Russian involvement. While Mueller turned in his report on March 22, Attorney General William Barr did not release its contents, instead summarizing the findings in a letter.

Among the crowd at the Common were professors, senior citizens, students, and music bands.

Event organizer Kim Spencer echoed the grievances of Democrat leadership and many citizens, noting that the hundreds of pages within Mueller’s Russia report have been shortened into a 4-page summary. Spencer charged Barr for failing to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Barr indicated. Specifically, Barr wrote that the special counsel did not find that Trump’s campaign ‘‘conspired or coordinated’’ with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. (Though Barr also included a quote from the report which read: “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” )

Ron Fein, the legal director for Free Speech for People, read from the articles of impeachment that were made against Richard Nixon to the crowd and compared that to Donald Trump’s intention to cover the evidence. After reading each item on that list against Richard Nixon, he asked the crowd, “Do we suspect Trump has done that?” The crowd replied each time, “yes!”

Spencer said that if Barr refuses to release the report, Congress should subpoena its contents or Mueller himself to help make the findings of his probe public.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office sent statements to the event which said that “the American people are entitled to the full Mueller report, not a 4-page partisan summary written by a guy who expresses bias against the Mueller investigation before it’s even complete.” The statement also noted  that “…up to 25 people in the Trump administration got security accesses after their application have been turned down, these people had questionable foreign ties and serious financial conflicts of interest but the White House gave them accesses anyways.”
On April 9, Barr announced he would release a redacted version of the 400-page report sometime this week. As of press time, the report has not been made public.