Pundits, reporters, and attorneys worldwide were ready to power through the Mueller Report with the ever-helpful CTRL-F function. Too bad that ain’t going to happen. Whoever posted it to the Department of Justice website put up an unsearchable version. Take a look.
It’s 448 pages. Have fun parsing through all that.
This is going to slow down a whole lot of people.
Curious Rick: what’s your first Ctrl+F once the report is released?
— Jaime Santos (@Jaime_ASantos) April 17, 2019
CNN even published a recommended a list of terms you should search. Eg. Like “dirt,” “Junior,” and “McGahn.”
Of course the report is not searchable. Who’s posting a searchable copy? https://t.co/SQPVcYXHts
— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) April 18, 2019
And yes, trying to use OCR on the document to make it searchable has crashed Acrobat.
— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) April 18, 2019
Reporters long frustrated with being sent FOIs on PDF: you can’t search or cut and paste from the Mueller report. Mourinho-style tactics https://t.co/MWXAjRLz6l
— Graeme Demianyk (@GraemeDemianyk) April 18, 2019
Available court documents from the federal government aren’t always searchable. They can do it for indictments, but then again, the recent charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were clearly based on a hard copy too.
Ah, well. Sadly, we are now forced to search for James Comey references by reading the Mueller Report one word at a time, like cavemen! The horror!
It’s worth mentioning that this sort of thing wouldn’t fly in some courts, depending on their local rules. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit demands that submitted PDFs “must” be searchable. The Eighth Circuit makes the same request.
[Image via SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images]
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