The real reason last night’s Robert Mueller sentencing memo against Paul Manafort still hasn’t been publicly released

| 12:23 pm EST February 23, 2019
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At midnight eastern time last night, Special Counsel Robert Mueller faced a hard deadline for filing his sentencing memo in the Paul Manafort case. It’s a given that Mueller filed the report, because 1) he doesn’t miss hard deadlines, and 2) he’d have asked the judge for an extension last night if there were some reason he couldn’t file. But the court, which generally always makes these kinds of filings public, still has yet to do so. What gives?

There are really only two explanations for a public court filing still not yet having been publicly released this many hours after it was filed. The first is that it’s chock full of information that’s either classified, or needs to be kept secret because it relates to other ongoing criminal cases, and the document is still being parsed by the court to make sure the redactions are thorough enough. The second is that the entire thing has been filed under seal for now, because Mueller has pending legal action against other people (read: indictments) coming within days.

If you’ve been hoping that this filing will include illuminating new information about Donald Trump’s crimes and/or the overall Trump-Russia election conspiracy, this delay may actually be good news. Nobody likes redactions, of course. But the point here is that the report must be so lengthy and detailed, it’s taking significant time to parse what should be redacted vs what should be made public.

That’s not to say that you should get your hopes up. The Michael Flynn sentencing memo was famously redacted almost in its entirety. That could be the case here again with the Paul Manafort sentencing memo. But even the few non-redacted pieces of the Flynn document provided big clues. And of course, as we get closer to Robert Mueller’s big endgame against Donald Trump, he has fewer reasons to redact his big secrets, and more reasons to begin making them public.