Good evening from the WSJ Washington Bureau. This is a special edition of the newsletter on the Mueller report, starting with the overall findings and then going into greater detail on specific topics. We also have reactions from the White House and Capitol Hill.

President Trump persistently tried to curtail or shut down the special counsel's investigation, according to Robert Mueller’s report, which also gave a detailed account of Russia’s election interference and its efforts to communicate with the Trump campaign.

The 448-page report follows a nearly two-year investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and ties to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Besides laying out its findings of actions by Mr. Trump and his associates, the document presented Mr. Mueller’s legal reasons for not reaching a conclusion on whether Mr. Trump committed a crime, and the basis for not establishing that campaign contacts were part of a criminal conspiracy, report Aruna Viswanatha and Sadie Gurman.

Mr. Mueller, explaining in the report why he didn’t pursue an obstruction charge, cited in part Justice Department guidance that a sitting president can’t be indicted. “Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching” a judgment that Mr. Trump committed crimes “when no charges can be brought,” Mr. Mueller wrote in the report.

• Mr. Mueller’s team examined 10 episodes, ranging from those publicly well known -- including former FBI Chief James Comey’s firing -- to others behind the scenes, including efforts to have then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly announce that the investigation was “very unfair,” and asking his then-White House counsel Don McGahn to publicly dispute accurate media reports that Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Mueller’s removal.
• Lawyers for Mr. Trump called the report “nothing more than an attempt to rehash old allegations.” Mr. Trump told reporters: “This should have never happen to another president again—this hoax.”

Democrats are grappling with the politically risky decision of what to do next: Use the report to campaign against President Trump’s re-election bid or try to impeach him first, write Siobhan Hughes and Rebecca Ballhaus. “The responsibility now falls to Congress to hold the president accountable for his actions,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) said, adding that impeachment is “one possibility, there are others.” 

• Mr. Nadler's committee would be responsible for conducting a review of whether the president obstructed justice as he tried to shut down the probe of any ties between his campaign and Moscow. That question took on new life Thursday when it became clear that Mr. Barr and Mr. Mueller assessed the evidence against the president differently.

Mr. Trump has said he wanted an attorney general who would protect him. Critics say that William Barr is emerging as that man, Sadie Gurman reports. Mr. Barr’s staunch defense of the presidency Thursday isn’t new for the legal veteran.

The special counsel found that President Trump engaged in "multiple acts" that could have exerted influence on law enforcement investigations. But his efforts were "mostly unsuccessful" because his subordinates refused to carry out his orders, writes Byron Tau. The Mueller report details extensive efforts by Mr. Trump to influence the course of the investigation, including unsuccessfully directing his then-White House counsel to seek Mr. Mueller's dismissal and pressuring then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to publicly criticize the probe.

• According to the report, when Mr. Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017, Mr. Trump slumped back in his chair and told aides, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m f---ed.”
• On Thursday, President Trump rejected the notion that he tried to curtail the investigation.  "I had the right to end the whole Witch Hunt if I wanted. I could have fired everyone, including Mueller, if I wanted," he tweeted. "I chose not to."

The report is unlikely to quell the debate over whether President Trump improperly sought to thwart the Russia investigation. Mr. Mueller suggested that Mr. Trump’s interventions in the probe and efforts to conceal them betrayed a corrupt intent that may have crossed legal lines. At the same time, the special counsel didn’t find that justice had been flagrantly sabotaged, reports Jacob Gershman.

After almost two years of investigation, political psychodrama, public name-calling and private intrigue, it should come as no surprise that the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election left almost nobody completely happy.

Instead, by clearing President Trump legally while also declaring he couldn’t exonerate him fully, Mr. Mueller has merely ensured that the argument over what Team Trump did and didn’t do will move out of the legal forum and into the political arena. There, it is certain to continue in Congress—and ultimately figures to be settled by voters in the 2020 presidential campaign.

Ironically, the person who seemed most pleased Thursday was the man at the center of the storm, President Trump. As recently as last week, Mr. Trump declared that the Mueller report was being prepared “by 18 Angry Democrats who also happen to be Trump Haters (and Clinton Supporters).”

Certainly the report blows away the legal cloud that had been hanging over President Trump and some of his associates. Mr. Mueller concluded that he had found no illegal cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russian agents, and he declined to draw a conclusion on whether the president had obstructed investigators. Those two broad findings were enough to make Thursday a good day for the president, and a bad one for opponents who once thought the Mueller report would bring about the president’s downfall.

Still, those who hoped for a clear, black-or-white day of reckoning didn’t get that on Thursday. READ THE FULL ARTICLE

The special counsel's report, in revisiting the relationship between President Trump and then-FBI Director James Comey, ultimately finds Mr. Comey to be the more credible of the two men.  For example, Mr. Trump’s schedule corroborates Mr. Comey’s well-known account of his January 2017 dinner with Mr. Trump, Aruna Viswanatha reports.

• After Mr. Comey's version of the dinner became public, Mr. Trump disputed that he had asked for any loyalty and told NBC that he thought Mr. Comey "had asked for the dinner" and "wanted to stay on." But the president’s daily schedule confirmed that Mr. Trump himself extended the dinner invitation to Mr. Comey, the report said.

Donald Trump Jr., perhaps more so than any other member of the president's orbit, was the subject of constant rumors about a possible indictment. In his report, Mr. Mueller lays out why he decided not to prosecute the president's eldest son, who was involved in several episodes the investigation probed, reports Rebecca Ballhaus.

The special counsel's Russia report offers new glimpses into the strained tenure of Mr. Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Mr. Sessions made the decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation due to his own close ties to the Trump campaign. Mr. Trump more than once confronted the attorney general himself to pressure him to "unrecuse" and regain control of the investigation, the report says, writes Byron Tau.

The two-volume report is 448 pages, or 138 megabytes on disk. It is about 16,500 lines long, including footnotes. About 2,050 lines—12.4% of the report—are blacked out.

Among those redactions:

• 1,260 lines, or 61% of all redacted lines, are redacted for the reason "Harm to ongoing matter"
• 500 lines, or 24% of all redacted lines, are redacted for the reason "Grand Jury Material"
• 170 lines, or 7% of all redacted lines, are redacted for the reason "Investigative technique"
• 130 lines, or 6% of all redacted lines, are redacted for the reason "Personal privacy"

Read the full document, or check out key excerpts from the two-volume report, with annotations by Wall Street Journal reporters. 

This newsletter is a production of the WSJ Washington bureau. Our newsletter editors are Tim Hanrahan, Kate Milani, Troy McCullough and Daniel Nasaw. Send feedback to capitaljournal@wsj.com. You can follow politics coverage during the day on our Politics page and at @wsjpolitics.