Reporters and many readers waited up late into the night last night for the Manafort sentencing memo. It never came, for reasons discussed here. Then this afternoon a mammoth sentencing memo was released which was nevertheless quite anticlimactic for anyone waiting for a clearer understanding of the ultimate findings of Mueller’s investigation.
The Special Counsel’s office has used previous such memos, especially ones based on false statements, to lay out some of the substance of those false statements: why the liars lied, what the truth was they were trying to conceal. In so doing, we’ve often gotten more detail on the substantive findings of the investigation into potential collusion.