Donald Trump could still have a lot to lose when a redacted version of Robert Mueller’s Russia report is published this week, even if William Barr all but ensured he was in the clear legally on matters of collusion and obstruction of justice. Open questions remain about many of the special counsel’s findings, which some investigators have reportedly said were inadequately represented in the attorney general’s four-page summary, particularly on the matter of obstruction. The report, which numbers nearly 400 pages, is also expected to contain a wealth of potentially embarrassing details about the campaign and Trump’s behavior while in office. And yet, according to multiple reports, the president and his aides have taken a notably “blas´e” approach to the report’s imminent release.

According to The New York Times, Trump has more or less viewed the matter as settled since March 24, the day Barr told lawmakers that Mueller hadn’t been able to establish collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, and that he’d punted his decision on obstruction of justice to the attorney general and Rod Rosenstein, who ruled in the president’s favor. Trump has reportedly felt “liberated” in the weeks since Barr’s letter, and indeed has taken to pushing the limits of his presidency, going on the attack and encouraging his attorney general to, as he put it in a tweet Monday, “investigate the investigators.” That more or less squares with a recent Axios report, which found the president’s team “relaxed” ahead of the Mueller drop. Trump has apparently brought up the matter with less frequency in meetings and phone calls to his outside advisers, and he and key team members reportedly spent the weekend ahead of the report’s publication watching the Masters.

“The facts are that there was no collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, no obstruction of justice, and President Trump has been fully vindicated,” Boris Epshteyn, a political commentator and former White House aide, told the Times. “No amount of spin by the opponents is going to change that.”

Of course, Trump and his allies have engaged in spin of their own in repeatedly describing the Mueller report, which they have not read, as having “exonerated” the president—a strategy that could come back to bite them if the full report doesn’t support the conclusions they’ve drawn. “Whatever Trump may have thought when he claimed total exoneration two weeks ago, subsequent events strongly suggest that claim will fall flat on its face,” Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, told the Times.

To be sure, despite his team’s lackadaisical approach, Trump’s actions betray a hint of trepidation. He has publicly expressed opposition to the full report being released, suggesting he is worried about its contents, despite his handpicked attorney general having drawn the probe to a favorable end. There is particular concern in the administration, according to ABC News’s Jon Karl, about what former White House counsel Don McGahn shared with the special counsel. According to the Times, the president’s choice to ramp up anti-immigration efforts, including floating a controversial proposal by Stephen Miller to release detained undocumented immigrants into sanctuary cities, is a deliberate attempt to distract from the report’s release.

Trump may take solace in the fact that he has an attorney general who appears willing to go to bat for him; Barr, after all, not only cleared him of collusion and obstruction, but also appears to have taken up the president’s call to probe the origins of the Russia investigation itself and has parroted some of Trump’s talking points, including that Barack Obama may have “spied” on his campaign. Still, his reality-distortion strategy is ultimately limiting. “He will probably have succeeded in setting the narrative for his core supporters and hardening their attitudes, but at the expense of anyone else believing him when the report comes out and inevitably undermines what he’s been claiming,” former D.O.J. spokesman Matthew Miller told the Times. “The same things that solidify his base just prevent him from expanding beyond it at all.” Even if he can’t convince everyone he’s been completely exonerated by the Mueller report, however, Trump may at least be able to use his bully pulpit to muddy the political waters, blunting the impact of details that could incriminate him.

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