Russians Want Unredacted Mueller Report

The Russian Intelligence services are going to be hard at work to get that unredacted report drawn up by the Special Counsel's Office.  If you look at the parts that are redacted, most of the reasons are Harm to Ongoing Matter, which means, if disclosed the information would negatively impact the criminal prosecution of a case under investigation. Having many instances of this in the past, I can tell you that is a big umbrella, but a necessary one. 

Suppose we have a simplified drug case that involves a person on drugs, a distributor of drugs in Cleveland, a distributor of drugs in Mexico, and a cartel of drug dealers operating under local government protection.  We indict the dealer in Cleveland and allow the buyer of drugs from that dealer to testify about where he bought these drugs and from whom.  It's dangerous, but he does it. 

We put that together with months of audio and video collected during a court-ordered surveillance.  We got that because we did not announce the arrest of the drug buyer when he was first detected.   We could, if we wanted and were short-sighted, stop there and take this guy to court, arrest his supplier and bring that to a Grand Jury for an indictment, try them both and announce a great victory against drug suppliers in one city.  This is what a lot of jurisdictions do because they want prosecution points for someone running for political office and that is the only picture they see. 

Or, we could do a search of our friendly associates, usually drug task forces, and see if they had any cases ongoing involving this same group or groups that get their drugs from the same sources do.  This takes a lot of time but we can start to get to where those drugs are coming from and who is behind distribution to them.  Getting higher up takes even more time, but at that level, you get a good deal more government intelligence. 

Now put together all the things you have and write a report about it for the FBI. 

 In this case, it is largely things surrounding the indictment of Russians who participated in one campaign to influence the 2016 election but there is a lot of other information that comes from asking for intelligence related to that subject.  That is what the Russians want.  How did the surveillance occur and who was detected during that time?  We could just hand that over directly by publicizing everything we have on this in our report, or we could make them guess and wonder what was coming next.  You get our original sources for the drug bust and the distribution center in Cleveland, killed.  Some people who want publicity for their own glorification over secrecy won't mind.  Nobody looks at them and says, "You killed that poor guy." I wish we did.