William Barr testifies before Senate panel on Mueller report
Attorney General William Barr is appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he will be grilled for the first time since the release of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report and a day after reports surfaced that Mueller criticized how Barr characterized his findings.
The attorney general in his prepared remarks to lawmakers defended his decision to write that President Trump did not obstruct justice, a finding that runs counter to Mueller’s report.
“After carefully reviewing the facts and legal theories outlined in the report … the deputy attorney general and I concluded that, under the principles of federal prosecution, the evidence developed by the special counsel would not be sufficient to charge the president with an obstruction-of-justice offense,” Barr will say, referring to Rod Rosenstein.
He will also say that he and Rosenstein “knew that we had to make this assessment because, as I previously explained, the prosecutorial judgment whether a crime has been established is an integral part of the department’s criminal process.”
The decision to release the report, with redactions, was required because of the “extraordinary public interest in this investigation.”
“However, I determined that it was necessary to make as much of it public as I could and committed the department to being as transparent as possible,” Barr will tell lawmakers.
Barr also addresses weighing the legal theories surrounding the possibility of indicting a sitting president, “but at the end of the day, the federal prosecutor must decide yes or no. That is what I sought to address in my March 24 letter.”
“From here on, the exercise of responding and reacting to the report is a matter for the American people and the political process,” Barr concludes in his remarks.
Democrats highly criticized Barr for releasing a four-page summary of Mueller’s report on March 24 that found that the president was cleared of colluding with Russia during the 2016 election and of obstructing justice in the investigation.
Trump seized on the findings in Barr’s letter to claim that he was completely exonerated, saying there was “no collusion, no obstruction.”
But Mueller sent the Justice Department a letter three days later complaining that the attorney general’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the special counsel’s probe, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Mueller followed up his letter with a 15-minute phone call to Barr the next day.
In his letter, Mueller accused Barr of thwarting the reason behind the special counsel’s appointment.
“There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation,” he wrote in the letter. “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.”
When Barr released a redacted version of Mueller’s 448-page report on April 18, it found that there was no evidence that there had been a criminal conspiracy but did not come to a conclusion on obstruction, leaving it up to Congress to decide.
The report outlined 10 possible instances of obstruction, including Trump’s pressuring former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller.
Barr is scheduled to testify at the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, but has signaled he may not appear because he opposes the questioning format that the panel’s chair, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, has proposed.