More heavy reading

Despite best intentions, I never got around to looking at, let alone reading, the Brexit agreement that PM May cooked up with our partners in Europe. Much easier just to look at the pictures in the reports about people squabbling about the report, people who had probably not read it either.

And today we have another such document, of roughly the same length, that is to say the redacted version of the long awaited 'Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election'.

Oddly enough, when I go to the Justice Department website at reference 2, while I can find the Attorney General's remarks on the occasion of the release of the report to Congress, that is to say to Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, I failed to find the report itself. Perhaps I have caught the sun, of which there is plenty here at Epsom today.

For that, I had to turn to the CNN website, from where I was able to download a copy, made available for the convenience of readers at reference 3. All 137Mb of it. And to think that it is not that many years since moving around and accessing a document of these dimensions would have been a major operation in its own right.

So far, all I have been able to do so far is admire the thorough ways of the redactors, who have marked each bit that they have blanked out with a reason for the blanking out. Very thorough people these lawyers in the US. And very literal I recall reading somewhere, perhaps in connection with their investigations into the affairs of President Clinton: never mind what the words were meant to mean, what do they actually mean. But I offer a snippet by way of an appetizer:

'The Trump Organization and the Crocus Group, a Russian real estate conglomerate owned and controlled by Aras Agalarov, began discussing a Russia-based real estate project shortly after the conclusion of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Donald J. Trump Jr. served as the primary negotiator on behalf of the Trump Organization; Emin Agalarov (son of Aras Agalarov) and Irakli "Ike" Kaveladze represented the Crocus Group during negotiations, with the occasional assistance of Robert Goldstone'.

Fascinating stuff. Notwithstanding, I expect that this report is going to go the same way as the Brexit agreement, that is to say down the memory hole (for which see reference 4)  - and I will continue to rely on the pictures in the reports about people squabbling about it.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/brexit-blunder.html.

Reference 2: https://www.justice.gov/.

Reference 3: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AvPvDT7vzzpQhN9Fo5YZggGA8eK4Jw. Later: hmmm. Maybe we have hit a limit in OneDrive. The link hasn't yet failed, but it hasn't yet loaded either.

Reference 4: Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell - 1949. Published, as it happens, just four months before my arrival in the world.