Americans Agree on One Thing About the Mueller Report: Disgust With the Country’s Leaders

Still, the exasperated relief that the two-year investigation had come to an end bumped up against another, contradictory impulse among Trump supporters. If a waste of time goes on long enough, some said, shouldn’t someone be held accountable for all that wasting?

“I’m kind of torn,” said Emily Ellis, a Trump supporter and paralegal on her way home from her job at a Pittsburgh law firm. “I would love it if everybody would say, ‘Let’s just end it and move on.’”

But if the Democrats insisted on continuing to investigate Mr. Trump, she said, Republicans should insist on scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s investigators, including, as some vocal Trump supporters have demanded, a deep look into the actions behind the Mueller investigation.

“It depends on how the Democrats behave,” Ms. Ellis said. “If you’re in a battle, you don’t want to roll over and let them run right over you.”

While many said they were processing the Mueller report findings through the pundits, often from their preferred partisan outlets — Fox News or MSNBC, depending — others welcomed the opportunity to see the facts straight on. In two years of learning about the report through anonymous leaks and pundit speculation, and weeks of knowing only the attorney general’s brief summary, Thursday was the first chance to see for themselves.

Bruce Bell, a heavy truck electrical systems technician in Michigan, was eager to download and read all 448 pages. The release of the report was a rare shot of reality, undiluted by the media speculation that had long surrounded it — the “truth of the matter, not conjecture,” said Mr. Bell, 32.

Jayne Navarre, 61, sat down at her computer on Thursday morning to begin reading through the report herself and said it “felt objective.”