A week after receiving the final special counsel report and five days after delivering the first teaser trailer for the feature-length international non-crime drama that is the Mueller report, William Barr wrote another letter to Lindsey Graham and Jerry Nadler.
Barr has come under fire this week from Democrats and every mainstream media outlet not called “Fox News” for delivering an “insufficient” four-page summary of what is apparently a ~400 page report.
To be completely fair to Barr, one imagines that “summarizing” what was variously billed as the most consequential document in modern political history in the space of 36 hours would have been a near impossible task even in the best of times. Suffice to say these are not the best of times inside the Beltway.
Trying to strike a balance between serving the public, meeting Democrat demands for complete transparency and making good on an implicit obligation to protect a sitting US president, all in a highly-charged environment, was an exercise in abject futility. Somebody was going to come away unsatisfied and given that Barr was arguably installed for the express purpose of shielding Trump, those “somebodies” were destined to be Democrats and Trump critics.
That said, if everybody at the Justice Department and on team Trump is so sure that the report amounts to a complete “exoneration” of the president with regard to collusion, and if Barr has already decided not to pursue the obstruction angle, why not just assign a team of lawyers to redact this thing, release it to the public and call this matter closed?
Instead, Barr has stonewalled Democrats who appear to be on the AG’s schedule (as opposed to the other way around) when it comes to both receiving the full report and getting ol’ Bill up to Capitol Hill to testify.
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‘We’re Not Happy, To Put It Mildly’: Barr Stonewalls Congress On Mueller Report
So, in order to improve the optics, Barr went ahead and said that a redacted version will be delivered to Congress and (it sounds like) made public “by mid-April if not sooner.”
Mueller is apparently assisting Barr in a series of redactions in accordance with the law and also in keeping with an effort to avoid “compromising sensitive sources and methods”. The redacted version will also protect “material that could affect other ongoing matters, including those that the special counsel has referred to other department offices.”
Barr continues, noting that his March 24 letter “was not, and did not purport to be, an exhaustive recounting of the special counsel’s investigation or report.” In fact, Barr doesn’t sound like he’s even sure he’s capable of delivering such an “exhaustive” account. “I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion”, he goes on to write.
Instead, Barr says “everyone will soon be able to read it on their own”.
As to whether Trump is going to get a crack at editing it himself, the answer would appear to be no.
“Although the president would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report, he has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review”, Barr wrote.
Finally, Barr says he will be “available” to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 1 and before the House Judiciary Committee the next day.
At the risk of coming across as unduly fatalistic (which has generally been our tone in these pages all week), it doesn’t sound like there’s a whole lot here that anyone over at the DoJ is concerned about. That could well be because most of what Trump did in terms of obstructing justice was done in full view of the public.
Additionally, all of the things Democrats have variously pointed to as “evidence” of collusion have been parsed relentlessly by the media and discussed on live television by a veritable parade of experts, prosecutors and former intelligence officials.
The point: It isn’t at all clear that anyone is going to learn anything “new” here and even if we do, it’s probably a safe bet that most of the voting public has already made up their minds about this. That is, if you haven’t heard enough from Trump’s own mouth to be convinced that he’s guilty of obstruction (he is), then nothing is going to convince you. The same thing goes for the collusion story (assuming there’s a definition of “collusion”, his campaign surely fits it, at least from a common sense perspective, if not on a legal basis).
But maybe that’s the wrong read. We’ll find out soon enough, though. Because according to the letter embedded in full below, the Mueller report is coming soon to a theater near you.
Although a longtime Democrat my parents have been glued to Fox news and are big Trump supporters. The Democrats appear to be committing that Japanese thing..whati’s it called? Harry Carry (oops, that’s a baseball announcer). Something like that. Well, at least we have Biden to fall back on.
hari kari mate
blerg — hara kiri or seppuku — 2nd time lucky
Barr’s strategy seems to be to appear amenable and reasonable, while adding ever more reasons for redactions and delay to give POTUS more time to shout “No Collusion” and (falsely) “Total Exoneration” to Trump’s rallies of true believers, the media and the American public at large until they believe it and the masses become de-senstitized to the non-exoneration and excessive questionable and bad behavior examples in Mueller’s Report which may not have risen to the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ criminal conviction criteria Mueller used as his yardstick.