The Justice Department is admitting that Robert Mueller is frustrated with William Barr. Cenk Uygur, Ramesh Srinivasan, and Brooke Thomas, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. MORE TYT: https://go.tyt.com/7ks
“A Justice Department spokeswoman said Tuesday that special counsel Robert Mueller expressed “frustration” to Attorney General William Barr in late March over the lack of context in the attorney general’s four-page memo describing his investigation’s findings. Mueller “expressed frustration over the lack of context and the resulting media coverage” of his obstruction inquiry in a phone call following the release of Barr’s four-page letter, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in a statement to The Hill. Kupec said Barr called Mueller after receiving a letter in which, according to The Washington Post, the special counsel wrote that Barr’s March 24 memo did not “capture the context, nature, and substance” of his findings.”
William Barr Explains Finding of No Obstruction on Mueller Probe
Attorney general appears before a Senate panel after letter indicates dispute over characterizing special counsel probe
Mr. Barr said at the Wednesday hearing he was surprised that Mr. Mueller wouldn’t reach a conclusion about obstruction, and he said he conveyed that message to the special counsel in a March 5 briefing. Among other reasons, Mr. Mueller cited a longstanding Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Mr. Barr said he pressed Mr. Mueller for more about his reasoning.
“If he felt he shouldn’t go down a path of making a traditional prosecutive decision then he shouldn’t have investigated,” Mr. Barr said. “That was the time to pull up.”
.. “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. Barr subsequently determined that the evidence Mr. Mueller’s investigation developed was insufficient to establish a crime Mr. Barr said in a March 24 summary of the Mueller findings that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded the evidence gathered wasn’t enough to establish an obstruction-of-justice offense.Opening statements by the chairman and ranking member of the panel reflected the deep partisan divide that has shaped how Mr. Mueller’s report—and Mr. Barr’s characterization of it—has been received.
South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who chairs the panel, and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein focused on vastly different points in their statements.
Mr. Graham said that the president couldn’t have obstructed justice if there was no underlying crime committed by Mr. Trump’s campaign associates. Mr. Mueller’s probe didn’t establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government.
“Attempted obstruction of justice of a crime that never occurred seems to be the new standard around here, to me it doesn’t make any sense,” Mr. Graham said.
Under the law, obstruction doesn’t require a successful effort. Nor does a prosecutor need to prove there was an underlying crime that a suspect was covering up.
Ms. Feinstein took an opposite tack. “Contrary to the declarations of the total and complete exoneration,” the report contained “substantial evidence of misconduct,” Ms. Feinstein said, referring to descriptions in the report that showed how the Trump campaign had welcomed, encouraged, and expected to benefit from Russia’s interference and how Mr. Trump tried to limit or influence the investigation.
In his report, Mr. Mueller cited in part Justice Department guidance as a reason he didn’t pursue obstruction charges.
A centerpiece of the hearing was the letter sent by Mr. Mueller to the attorney general on March 27. The letter, released Wednesday morning, showed that Mr. Mueller twice encouraged Mr. Barr to quickly release a fuller account of his team’s Russia investigation and expressed concerns that Mr. Barr’s early portrayals had failed to capture the nature and context of his team’s work and findings.
William Barr Testimony Live: Attorney General Faces Lawmakers’ Questions About Mueller Report
Attorney General William Barr is facing questions Wednesday from the Senate Judiciary Committee over his handling of the Mueller report.
Mr. Barr said that he met with special counsel Robert Mueller in early March, where he was told by Mr. Mueller that the special counsel report wouldn’t reach a determination on the question of obstruction — something he said that the department didn’t expect.
“We were frankly surprised that they were not going to reach a decision on obstruction,” Mr. Barr said.
“We did not understand exactly why the special counsel was not reaching a decision and when we pressed him on it, he said his team was still formulating the explanation,” Mr. Barr said of the meeting, which took place on March 5.
Once it became clear that the Mueller team was going to punt on the question of obstruction, Mr. Barr said it became his responsibility.
The special counsel investigation was meant to deliver a verdict on criminality — not to simply report facts to the public, he said. “We don’t conduct criminal investigations just to collect information and put it out to the public,” Mr. Barr said.
After the special counsel’s report was delivered and Mr. Mueller objected to the attorney general’s four-page characterization of its findings, Mr. Barr said he called Mr. Mueller after receiving his March 27 letter and asked him “what’s the issue here?”
Mr. Mueller told him his characterization of the investigation’s findings was not inaccurate but he was frustrated that news reporting had failed to capture his team’s nuanced thinking, according to Mr. Barr.
“I asked him specifically what his concern was, and he said his concern focused on his explanation of why he did not reach a conclusion on obstruction and he wanted more put out on that issue,” Mr. Barr said. “He was very clear that he was not suggesting we had misrepresented his report. I told Bob I wasn’t interested in putting out summaries …. I wanted to put out the whole report.”
.. In his remarks, Mr. Barr said the Justice Department’s primary obligation is to determine whether a crime has been committed, rather than lay out facts without making a determination.
“At the end of the day, the federal prosecutor must decide yes or no. That is what I sought to address,” Mr. Barr will say, according to his prepared remarks. “It would not have been appropriate for me simply to release the obstruction section of the report without making a prosecutorial judgment.”
He ended his prepared remarks by saying the facts Mr. Mueller uncovered are now public, and it is up to Americans to figure out what happens next.
Mueller Objected to Barr’s Description of Russia Investigation’s Findings on Trump
Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, wrote a letter in late March to Attorney General William P. Barr objecting to his early description of the Russia investigation’s conclusions that appeared to clear President Trump on possible obstruction of justice, according to the Justice Department and three people with direct knowledge of the communication between the two men.
The letter adds to the growing evidence of a rift between them and is another sign of the anger among the special counsel’s investigatorsabout Mr. Barr’s characterization of their findings, which allowed Mr. Trump to wrongly claim he had been vindicated.
It was unclear what specific objections Mr. Mueller raised in his letter, though a Justice Department spokeswoman said on Tuesday evening that he “expressed a frustration over the lack of context” in Mr. Barr’s presentation of his findings on obstruction of justice. Mr. Barr defended his descriptions of the investigation’s conclusions in conversations with Mr. Mueller over the days after he sent the letter, according to two people with knowledge of their discussions.
Mr. Barr, who was scheduled to testify on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the investigation, has said publicly that he disagrees with some of the legal reasoning in the Mueller report. Senior Democratic lawmakers have invited Mr. Mueller to testify in the coming weeks but have been unable to secure a date for his testimony.
A central issue in the simmering dispute is how the public’s understanding of the Mueller report has been shaped since the special counsel ended his investigation and delivered his 448-page report on March 22 to the attorney general, his boss and longtime friend. The four-page letter that Mr. Barr sent to Congress two days later gave little detail about the special counsel’s findings and created the impression that Mr. Mueller’s team found no wrongdoing, allowing Mr. Trump to declare he had been exonerated.
But when Mr. Mueller’s report was released on April 18, it painted a far more damning picture of the president and showed that Mr. Mueller believed that significant evidence existed that Mr. Trump obstructed justice.
“The special counsel emphasized that nothing in the attorney general’s March 24 letter was inaccurate or misleading,” a Justice Department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said in response to a request for comment made on Tuesday afternoon. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.
Over the past month, other signs of friction between the attorney general and the special counsel have emerged over issues like legal theories about constitutional protections afforded to presidents to do their job and how Mr. Mueller’s team conducted the investigation.
In congressional testimony in April before the report was released, Mr. Barr demurred when asked whether he believed that the investigation was a “witch hunt” — Mr. Trump’s preferred term. It “depends on where you’re sitting,” Mr. Barr replied.
“If you are somebody who’s being falsely accused of something, you would tend to view the investigation as a witch hunt,” he said, an apparent reference to the president.
Mr. Barr’s testimony stood in contrast to comments he made during his confirmation hearing in January. “I don’t believe Mr. Mueller would be involved in a witch hunt,” he said then.
A rift between the men appeared to develop in the intervening months as the special counsel wrapped up his inquiry.
The Justice Department received Mr. Mueller’s letter four days after Mr. Barr sent his conclusions to Congress. In response, the attorney general and the special counsel spoke on the phone, and Mr. Mueller laid out his concerns about the initial descriptions of the report.
At the time, the Justice Department had begun redacting the report and Mr. Mueller raised the question about whether more of it could be released.
“The attorney general ultimately determined that it would not be productive to release the report in piecemeal fashion,” Ms. Kupec said. “The attorney general and the special counsel agreed to get the full report out with necessary redactions as expeditiously as possible.”
But Mr. Mueller did lay out evidence against the president. After explaining that he had declined to make a prosecutorial judgment, citing as a factor a Justice Department view that sitting presidents cannot be indicted, the special counsel detailed more than a dozen attempts by the president to impede the inquiry. He also left open the door for charges after Mr. Trump leaves office.
“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” Mr. Mueller and his investigators wrote. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”
Mr. Mueller’s report, the attorney general and the other senior law enforcement officials believed, read like it had been written for consumption by Congress and the public, not like a confidential report to Mr. Barr, as required under the regulations governing the special counsel.
Some of the special counsel’s investigators have told associates that they were angry about Mr. Barr’s initial characterization of their findings, government officials and others have said, and that their conclusions were more troubling for Mr. Trump than Mr. Barr indicated in his four-page letter. That proved to be the case.
In one instance, Mr. Barr took Mr. Mueller’s words out of context to suggest that the president had no motive to obstruct justice. In another instance, he plucked a fragment from a sentence in the Mueller report that made a conclusion seem less damaging for Mr. Trump.
Investigators wrote, “Although the investigation established that
- the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that
- the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,
- the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Mr. Barr’s letter quoted only the passage that the investigation had found no conspiracy or coordination.
It is not clear whether members of Mr. Mueller’s team were angered by these points in particular, or whether Mr. Mueller’s letter cited them.
Despite the disagreement about the report, members of Mr. Mueller’s team worked alongside senior Justice Department officials to redact sensitive information from the report before it was released.
Hours before the public release of the Mueller report, Mr. Barr said during a news conference that he had “disagreed with some of the special counsel’s legal theories” about what constitutes presidential obstruction of justice. He also said repeatedly that the special counsel had found “no collusion” between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Mr. Trump often uses the term, but Mr. Mueller’s investigators pointed out it had no legal standard and left it out of their judgments.
Instead, investigators wrote that they had not found evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians.
Mr. Barr also said during the news conference that some of Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the investigation needed to be put in “context.”
“There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” he said.