Barr clears Trump, to skip next committee hearing
Credit to Author: ASSOCIATED PRESS| Date: Thu, 02 May 2019 16:16:38 +0000
WASHINGTON, D.C.: Private tensions between Justice Department leaders and special counsel Robert Mueller’s team broke into public view in extraordinary fashion, as Attorney General William Barr pushed back at the special counsel’s “snitty” complaints over his handling of the Trump-Russia investigation report.
At the Senate Judiciary Committee session, Barr spent hours defending his handling of Mueller’s report against complaints from Democrats and the special counsel himself.
He said, for instance, that he had been surprised that Mueller did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, and that he had felt compelled to step in with his own judgment that the President committed no crime.
“I’m not really sure of his reasoning,” Barr said of Mueller’s obstruction analysis, which neither accused the president of a crime nor exonerated him. If Mueller wasn’t prepared to make a decision on whether to bring charges, Barr added, “then he shouldn’t have investigated. That was the time to pull up.”
Barr was also perturbed by a private letter Mueller, a long-time friend, sent him complaining that the attorney general had not properly portrayed the special counsel’s findings in a four-page memo summarizing the report’s main conclusions. The attorney general called the note “a bit snitty.”
Testifying for the first time since releasing Mueller’s report, Barr faced sharp questioning from Senate Democrats who accused him of making misleading comments and seeming at times to be President Donald Trump’s protector as much as the country’s top law enforcement official.
The rift fueled allegations that Barr has spun Mueller’s findings in Trump’s favor and understated the gravity of Trump’s behavior. The dispute is certain to persist, as Democrats push to give Mueller a chance to answer Barr’s testimony with his own later this month.
Barr separately informed the House Judiciary Committee that he would not appear for its scheduled hearing Thursday because of the panel’s insistence that he be questioned by committee lawyers, as well as lawmakers. That refusal sets the stage for Barr to possibly be held in contempt of Congress.
“I said: ‘Bob, what’s with the letter? Just pick up the phone and call me if there is an issue;” Barr said.
The airing of disagreements was all the more striking since the Justice Department leadership and Mueller’s team had appeared unified in approach for most of the two-year investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The revelation that Mueller, who’d been publicly silent for the entire investigation, was agitated enough to send a letter to Barr — which could, and did, become public — lent his words extra credibility with Democrats, who accused Barr of lying under oath last month when he said he was unaware Mueller’s team was unhappy with how its work had been characterized.
Barr downplayed the special counsel’s complaints, saying they were mostly about process, not substance, while raising a few objections of his own in the other direction. He said that Mueller did not, as requested, identify grand jury material in his report when he submitted it, slowing the public release of the report as the Justice Department worked to black out sensitive information.
He also insisted that once Mueller submitted his report, the special counsel’s work was done and the document became “my baby.”
“It was my decision how and when to make it public,” Barr said. “Not Bob Mueller’s.”
Wednesday’s contentious Senate hearing gave Barr his most extensive opportunity to date to defend recent Justice Department actions, including a press conference before the report’s release and his decision to release a brief summary letter two days after getting the report.
But the hearing, which included three Democratic presidential candidates, also laid bare the partisan divide over the handling of Mueller’s report.
Some Republicans, in addition to defending Trump, focused on the president’s 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton’s email practices and what they argued has been a lack of investigation of them.
In related development, top Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said: “For me, it is over.”
With those few words, Graham, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, set the tone for his party at an extraordinary hearing with Barr over Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump.
Gaveling open the Wednesday session, Graham outlined the scope of Mueller’s nearly two-year probe, with its 2,000 subpoenas and million-plus documents turned over by the White House, and gave his take on the findings.
“So, no collusion, no coordination, no conspiracy,” Graham said.
Trump couldn’t have said it better. In fact, he didn’t. The President tweeted ahead of the session, “NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION.”
AP
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