But Weissmann finds himself disillusioned almost immediately—a moment he recounts in the book’s opening chapter as he reads Barr’s “summary” of the full Mueller report, frantically searching the attorney general’s letter on a Sunday afternoon for the scorching material that he knows is inside the report.
“I could not fathom that our work over the past twenty-two months was ending like this,” Weissmann writes. “We had gone out of our way to be fair and impartial, to conduct ourselves with professionalism, and to pressure test our investigation and its conclusions. We had given the subjects of the investigation the benefit of the doubt in our report, over and over, and had not leaked a single bit of embarrassing or damning information—only to now be blindsided by a political actor's efforts to twist our investigation. We had just been played by the attorney general.”
There is little subtlety to Weissmann’s view that Barr’s letter represented a miscarriage of justice. His book’s title comes from the John Locke quote, “wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” The spare red, white, and blue book cover features the letterhead of the attorney general, a facsimile apparently of the letter in which Barr “summarized” the principal conclusions in such a misleading way as to forever skew the public’s perception of the investigation. “Barr had spun our findings for political gain, at best, and lied for the president, at worst,” Weissmann writes. “Barr had been unmasked. His public face as an institutionalist hid a political soul.”
And yet in many ways, as the remainder of Weissmann’s book outlines, the die had already been cast by the time the team filed their final report. Mueller, cautious about provoking the ap ..
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