This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. The long-awaited Mueller report has been delivered to the Attorney General, and a summary has been delivered to Congress. What questions are left to be answered? Cato Senior Fellow Julian Sanchez comments.

The Mueller report is in, at least in a sense,

that is it's been written and it's been submitted to the

attorney general the attorney general released a small short document to

members of Congress to say these are essentially the top-line findings of this report about Russian

interference in U.S. elections in 2016.

In general, what are your first takeaways just from the summary that's been released?

I think my first takeaway is that we know something fairly important,

which is sort of the most cartoonish imaginable version of a kind of

Hollywood conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, it did not occur at least

doesn't appear to have generated enough

evidence to to believe it occurred and that's important but that's also not a

lot to learn from a multi-year extraordinarily labor and resource-intensive

investigation and so I don't think we'll really know what it means in a full sense until we've seen the full report or at least as much

of the report as can be released in light of ongoing investigations.

All right, so another point that you have made a long time ago,

essentially is that this investigation is not a waste of time if you believe that

the Russian intelligence agents attempted a campaign to influence U.S. elections. That alone makes some investigation worth it.

Right, I mean I think that there is a reaction we're seeing now that because the conclusion is, well, there wasn't a conspiracy that this was all a huge

waste of time and that seems you know a little crazy to me it's at this point I

think beyond serious dispute that there was an intelligence operation mounted by a foreign power to influence a presidential election.

Once we take that fact, it's sort of inconceivable that you wouldn't investigate that.

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