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Good luck finding the Mueller report on the Justice Department’s website

DOJ makes it very easy to find Attorney General William Barr's misleading, politicized speech on the report.

CREDIT: Alex Wong/Getty Images
CREDIT: Alex Wong/Getty Images

You should have no trouble obtaining a transcript and video of the attorney general’s misleading “no collusion” speech from the Justice Department (it’s on the agency’s homepage and they’ve tweeted it out), but good luck finding the actual report, which in fact does not exonerate the president of wrongdoing.

Yes, millions have the opportunity to read the redacted version of the 400-page “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Election: Volumes I and II” — or, as it’s more colloquially known, “The Mueller report.” But first you have to find it.

The good news is that you won’t have to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain it, which is a relief, as the Justice Department, in a letter to ThinkProgress yesterday, said it will need an additional 10 days to process that request. (We plan on obstinately insisting that they hew to this agreement.)

The bad news is that you won’t find the report immediately available on the main page of the Department of Justice’s website, despite the fact that the report is currently the most compelling reason to visit the DoJ’s site in the first place.

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On their main page, however, you will readily discover a link to Attorney General William Barr’s prepared remarks on the release of the Mueller report as well as a link to a video of Barr delivering these remarks. (Be sure you start the video at the 19:04 mark unless you like waiting and staring at a preview card for 20 minutes.)

In order to locate the report itself, you have to navigate to the part of the Justice Department’s website that’s specifically been sectioned off for the special counsel’s office at justice.gov/sco. On the DOJ’s main page, however, there’s no mention that the special counsel’s section exists. There’s no link, either. The special counsel doesn’t show up on the department’s organizational chart.

Happily, it can be found by typing “special counsel” into the search bar.

It’s all a little obtuse, especially considering the fact that there are perfectly good places on more prominent pages to stash a link to the report.

Here is where a normal person might expect to find a link to the Mueller Report.
Here is where a normal person might expect to find a link to the Mueller Report.

An inquiry to the Justice Department’s webmaster returned this reply: “Thank you for your email to the U.S. Department of Justice Webmaster. The Report is posted at  https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf and linked from the Special Counsel’s web site at https://www.justice.gov/sco.”

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DOJ Public Affairs Specialist Peter Carr similarly affirmed to ThinkProgress that the report could be found on the special counsel’s section of the webpage. Inquiries regarding the decision to exclude a link on the main page, or whether there might be a link to the report appended to the page in the future, went unanswered.

Perhaps the easiest thing to do under the circumstances is just get the Mueller report from us: