This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 23rd, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

Now that the Mueller report is out, at least mostly, what do we know that wasn't well reported beforehand

and how should Congress make use of the evidence provided?

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has poured over the report. He offers his thoughts.

It's actually surprising how much of the report had been public in dribs and drabs.

It may be that the primary significance of this is one to get things all in one place,

and two to confirm things that had been reported maybe based on anonymous sources, but you know weren't the sort of thing that that you could

100% you know count to take to the bank on the basis of that level of reporting you You know, there are a fair number of new details

on the obstruction and new information

about conversations that the president had

with his associates and a confirmation of orders to try and remove the special counsel or to get Jeff Sessions to de recuse himself and reign in that investigation on the collusion or cooperation with Russia

side to the extent that it makes sense to think of those as different pieces

which I'm not entirely certain it does.

The substance of a lot of it is stuff that's been in the press for months if not years at this point and the places where it looks

as though there might potentially be something new are redacted. So in a way the what is what sense

jumps out at me most from this is the number of things we still don't know, things that either Mueller didn't

follow up as thoroughly as one might have thought or that they weren't able to make a determination on either way,

or things that are discussed but in a redacted form.

And here I'm thinking specifically of sections that appear to pertain to Roger Stone's outreach to WikiLeaks and which are redacted as potentially harmful to an ongoing matter if disclosed.

All right, so there was a lot of reporting as you noted on this and a whole lot of this was

reported at one point or another. Has much of that been called into question with this report?

No, I think what this mostly does is validate the bulk of the reporting on things that were going on relevant to the

...