AG Bill Barr Defends Rollout of Mueller’s Report

* The comments came during Barr’s first appearance since the release of a redacted version of Mueller’s report.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday defended his rollout of Robert Mueller III’s findings and tamped down claims that Mueller believed Barr’s initial four-page memo outlining the principal conclusions of the special counsel’s findings was misleading.

Barr said he spoke with Mueller by phone in late March, and that Mueller made “very clear” in that call he was not suggesting the Justice Department misled the public. Instead, Barr said, Mueller believed public reporting of the memo was inaccurate and wanted more information to be released related to Mueller’s explanation for why he didn’t reach a conclusion on obstruction.

Barr’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday came moments after the public release of a March 27 letter Mueller sent to Barr complaining the attorney general’s initial four-page statement on the special counsel’s findings “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions.”

“There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation,” Mueller wrote. “This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Barr said he told Mueller during the call that he was not interested in putting out summaries about the report. Barr has come under fire for the release of the memo and recalled telling Mueller that he “wasn’t going to put out the report piecemeal.”

“I wanted to get the whole report out,” Barr said, believing the release of summaries could set off “a series of different debates and public discord over each tranche of information that went out, and I wanted to get everything out at once and we should start working on that.”

Nonetheless, Barr said he released the initial four-page memo to Congress on March 24 because “the body politic was in a high state of agitation.”

Barr reiterated that he offered Mueller an opportunity to review his four-page memo, but the special counsel declined.

Mueller’s March letter makes clear the special counsel at least twice urged the Justice Department to release his own executive summaries of his findings. He again encouraged Barr to release certain materials in late March, writing “release at this time would alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen and would answer congressional and public questions about the nature and outcome of our investigation.”

Barr also told lawmakers Wednesday that he was initially surprised when he learned Mueller would not reach a conclusion on whether to recommend obstruction charges against Trump. He said Mueller stated three times during a March meeting “that he emphatically was not saying that but for the (Office of Legal Counsel) opinion he would have found obstruction.”

Mueller told him that “in the future, the facts of a case against a president might be such that a special counsel would recommend abandoning the OLC opinion, but this is not such a case,” Barr said.

Barr has come under fire for his four-page memo and over how he characterized Mueller’s views after the letter’s release. On Wednesday, some Democratic lawmakers called on Barr to resign over an earlier statement he gave to Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland. Van Hollen asked Barr in an April 10 hearing, “Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?”

Barr replied: “I don’t know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion.”

Culled from law.com