Mueller says deleted information could have changed the course of his investigation

Attorney General William Barr announced definitively on Thursday that there was "no collusion" between President Trump, his campaign, or any Americans and the Russian government during the 2016 election. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, though, was decidedly more hesitant about making such confident claims. In a key part of the text highlighted by The Associated Press' Zeke Miller, Mueller notes that his investigation was hindered by witnesses invoking "their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination," by witnesses living overseas, and that "even when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed, they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete."

The most concerning caveat, though, was that Mueller admitted "relevant communications" were deleted by some of the individuals who were interviewed by the special counsel's team, or were otherwise encrypted or written using an application that didn't provide "long-term retention of data." As a result, "the Office was not able to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts."

Here's his key passage:

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Mueller appears to leave open the possibility that he could have reached different conclusions if such communications had been available to his team. Read the full text of his long-awaited report here.