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Mueller Objected to Barr’s Description of Russia Investigation’s Findings

WASHINGTON — 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 investigators about 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. 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.

“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. “But he expressed frustration over the lack of context and the resulting media coverage regarding the special counsel’s obstruction analysis.”

A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.

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.

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.

Mr. Barr and senior Justice Department officials were frustrated with how Mr. Mueller ended his investigation and drafted his report, according to the two people with knowledge of the discussions and another person briefed on the matter.

They expressed irritation that Mr. Mueller fell short of his assignment by declining to make a decision about whether Mr. Trump broke the law. That left Mr. Barr to clear Mr. Trump without the special counsel’s backing.

The senior department officials also found Mr. Mueller’s rationale for stopping short of deciding whether Mr. Trump committed a crime to be confusing and contradictory, and they concluded that Mr. Mueller’s report showed that there was no case against Mr. Trump.

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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 once 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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/us/politics/mueller-barr.html

However, according to the Washington Post, when Barr pressed Mueller as to whether Barr's summary was inaccurate, Mueller said that it was not. Instead, Mueller told Barr that media coverage of the letter had "misinterpreted" the results of the probe.

Oh that danged Biased Fake News Media.

Just because reading is not your strong suit:

The only thing Trump obstructed was the Democrats attempt to overturn an election with a coup.

This pretty much says it all:


It was unclear what specific objections Mr. Mueller raised in his letter. 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.

So no one knows what was in the letter, but we have a huge speculation to report, which is based on bias against Trump. Great reporting here again.

Let's not be silly. Be a man for once.

William Barr is in deep trouble

Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large

Updated 3:02 AM ET, Wed May 1, 2019
link


(CNN)Attorney General William Barr did two strange things between the time he received special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and when he released it to Congress and the public.

The first came on March 24 when, two days after receiving the Mueller report, Barr released a four-page summary letter in which he made clear his conclusion that the report found no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians and that Mueller hadn't made any recommendation as to whether President Donald Trump should be charged with obstructing justice.

The second came on the morning of April 18 when Barr, with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein by his side, held a press conference to reiterate those findings -- in remarkably Trumpian language -- 90 minutes before actually making a redacted version of the report public.

On Tuesday night, those two moves came into far sharper -- and more troubling -- focus when it was revealed that Mueller sent a letter to Barr on March 27 expressing concern about the ways in which Barr's summary document described the evidence surrounding obstructive behavior. Mueller did not make issue with any of the factual statements in Barr's four-page letter but rather the lack of nuance on obstruction -- and the resultant media coverage, according to CNN's Laura Jarrett's reporting.


That revelation creates a series of problems for Barr -- most notably that he appeared to be, at best, misleading in his answers about Mueller's feelings about his summary of the report.

On April 9, in a House hearing, Barr seemed entirely unaware of Mueller's issues with his summary report. Here's the key exchange between Barr and Florida Democratic Rep. Charlie Crist:

CRIST: Reports have emerged recently, general, that members of the special counsel's team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24 letter, that it does not adequately or accurately portray the report's findings. Do you know what they are referencing with that?

BARR: No, I don't.

In an April 10 appearance before the Senate Appropriations Committee, this exchange happened between Barr and Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen:

VAN HOLLEN: Did -- did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?

BARR: I don't know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion.

What Barr quite clearly knew at that point -- and had known for the better part of two weeks -- was that Mueller had issues with the way in which he presented the conclusions of the report in the four-page letter.

Now, you can argue that Barr technically didn't lie there. He knew that Mueller wasn't thrilled with the way he summarized the broader report but that didn't mean that Mueller opposed the conclusions. Again, that is technically possible. But, in the real world, it sure as hell seems like Barr was purposely obfuscating when it came to Mueller's view of the report so as to downplay any sense that a) he didn't present a full picture of the report and b) there was any rift between the two men.

And, given all of what he knew about Mueller's opinion of his summary letter, Barr's decision to hold a press conference more than an hour before the release of the actual report is even more concerning.

At the time -- even without the knowledge we now possess about the Mueller letter of March 27 -- it seemed odd. The attorney general holding a press conference about a report that he had seen but no one in the media had been given -- and wouldn't be for another 90 minutes? It seemed, even before Barr began speaking, to be a relatively transparent attempt by the AG to frame the soon-arriving Mueller report -- to set the terms of the conversation for both Congress and the American public.

Within minutes, it became clear that was exactly Barr's intent. Here's just a piece of what Barr said that day:

"So that is the bottom line. After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the special counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes."

As I noted at the time, Barr's language was strikingly similar to how Trump himself had long described the Mueller probe. But, that language from Barr seems far more damning for the attorney general in light of what he knew about both the repeated incidents of seemingly obstructive behavior in the Mueller report and also Mueller's own concerns about the language Barr had used to describe the finding in his March 24 summary letter.

Barr is set to sit to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. He's got a lot to answer for.

Mueller’s Willing to Testify, but Trump DOJ Is Holding It Up

The special counsel has indicated he’s fine going up the Hill. But the Trump administration is getting in the way, Dems say.

House Democrats tell The Daily Beast they’ve been told Special Counsel Robert Mueller is willing to testify before them about his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, but the Department of Justice has been unwilling to set a date for it to happen.

The impasse comes as lawmakers have grown increasingly frustrated over Attorney General Bill Barr’s handling of the release of the Mueller probe and as other Trump associates have declined to appear before congressional committees.

Shortly after it was reported on Tuesday night that Mueller had written and called Barr to complain that the attorney general had not fully represented the special counsel’s findings, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) sent out a statement demanding both men appear before his committee and saying he had been stonewalled so far.

“The Attorney General has expressed some reluctance to appear before the House Judiciary Committee this Thursday,” Nadler said. “These reports make it that much more important for him to appear and answer our questions. The Department of Justice has also been reluctant to confirm a date for Special Counsel Mueller to testify.”

Nadler had sent a letter to DOJ following the department’s release of the Mueller Report asking that Mueller appear for questioning no later than May 23. Two sources familiar with the conversations said the Judiciary Committee has been in regular contact with DOJ about setting a date for Mueller’s testimony and that those conversations were still going on. Committee sources said it was their impression that Mueller was willing to testify to discuss his findings, though it was unclear whether that would take place in public or behind closed doors.

But the DOJ has, according to multiple sources, not agreed to a date, citing Mueller’s continued status as a department employee—since the special counsel serves under the attorney general.

A Department of Justice spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

Barr, likewise, has been resisting congressional hearings, though mainly because he objects to the structuring of the proposed questioning. His reluctance has frustrated Democrats on the Hill, though he is slated to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

Last week, House Democrats held a caucus call in which they discussed their strategy for the Barr hearing and how to get the White House to cooperate on investigations. Subsequent conversations between senior members focused on whether impeachment proceedings were appropriate given Trump’s refusal to comply with subpoenas.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/robert-mue...ding-it-up-dems

Barr lied to congress when he said he didn’t know if Mueller supported his view on the report. Mueller wrote Barr a letter about Barr’s misrepresentation to the public of the report and Barr even called Mueller about it. He lied to Congress and he knows it. Barr is very close to obstructing justice and is now unreliable. He should be removed or resign.

Lol and trump had the audacity to claim he’s the most transparent president ever. What a joke.

What’s worse is people actually believe and defend him, no matter what he says.

And Barr has turned out to be much much worse than sessions. I didn’t think it could get worse than sessions. But I also didn’t think 60 million people would vote for trump so....

Sessions is better. Man that’s sad right?

Another hopeless NothingBurger for the Left.

Mueller's concern is with how the Press is reporting it.
Welcome to our world Mr.Mueller.

I wonder how those Nothingburgers sitting in jail from being sentenced from the Mueller probe.... so far.... are feeling about now.

Imagine the media that has doubled and tripled down on this collusion narrative for 3 years trying to save face.


An entire article to try and say that Mueller was frustrated with Barr boiled down to…...him being frustrated with the media coverage of it.....LOL

The media coverage resulted from the lack of context that Barr presented.

In a rebuke to Attorney General William Barr, special counsel Robert Mueller sent a letter last month stating that Barr's 4-page summary to Congress on the sweeping Russia investigation failed to "fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of Mueller’s work and conclusions, the Washington Post reports, citing a copy of the letter it obtained.

"There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. 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."

— The letter from Mueller to Barr reads, according to the Post


Then why is the DOJ delaying Mueller from testifying before congress?

Apparently Wapo left out that it was NOT Mueller who sent the letter, but unnamed members of his staff who were frustrated. That Barr spoke to Mueller directly who did not express these concerns. All of which is political drama, the results were the investigation concluded and no conspiracy charges were brought.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/01/politics/mueller-letter-to-barr/index.html

Here’s the letter mueller sent to Barr, specifically stating that the DoJ letter Barr sent to Congress did NOT fully capture he scope of the investigation.

But watch BpG argue otherwise.

Yep.

Yep .. heaped on top with GOPer stinky cheese

Barr is flat out lying to Congress. That can’t be spun away. Barr has to go.

Cept .. Barr already lied to Congress. Why should they believe him now? Dudes gotta go. He lied to Congress

Good one. Two liars winking back forth. Classic deplorables.

Shame Shame Shame. Tragic day for the USA. . . . Yes all AG's are hand picked. But this is the first who is a puppet. Contemptible.

Ah, the Breitbart guy. The letter to Barr was signed by and came from Mueller.

Mueller made it clear that he wasn't happy with the way Barr structured his letter and that it did not reflect what Mueller had found.

Just look at something for a second. Barr in his testimony yesterday stated that the purpose of his letter was to make conclusions on the Mueller report. Yet there were nothing but excuses for Trump because he was upset, mad and frustrated over media coverage.

That's not about the Mueller report. That was an excuse why poor Trump said and did horrible things. Kind of like those parents in the grocery store who do nothing but make excuses why their child is throwing a tantrum.

And in Barr's 19 page memo while he was auditioning for the job, he stated that it is his belief that a sitting president can not be indicted. So what other conclusion can that man come to except that the evidence does not lead to an indictment?

Barr is an obvious shill.

According to who? I heard Barr say that he spoke with Mueller directly multiple times and was told he didn't disagree with anything.

The special counsel assisted in forming the initial summary letter. All of this is about politics, fake, cosmetic bull [censored]. Nothing to see here.

This echos my statement above. Its on record that that both Barr and Mueller spoke privately many times in agreement. The only party in all of this trying to make anything is the media.

Yep.
Another big NothingBurger by the Left.

But in his letter, the first clear window into Mueller's thoughts since he became special counsel two years ago, he said Barr's summary of the investigation's principal conclusions "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the probe.

"There is now a 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."

Yeah, nothing to see here.

j/c:

Mueller to make 1st public statement on Russia probe

WASHINGTON (AP) — Special counsel Robert Mueller is set to make his first public statement on the Russia investigation Wednesday, the Justice Department said.

Mueller will speak at the Justice Department at 11 a.m. and won’t take any questions.

It was not clear what he intended to say, but the statement comes amid demands for Mueller to testify on Capitol Hill about his findings and tension with Attorney General William Barr over the handling of his report.

Mueller’s report into Russia meddling in the 2016 election did not find that Russia and the Trump campaign coordinated to sway the presidential election. It did not reach a conclusion on whether the president had obstructed justice.

https://apnews.com/94323cfc164c4759ba6bf84ad2a46203

Yes, Mueller to address the Nation at 11am!!!

Where is OCD???

Mueller is going to arrest Trump!

Nancy is cleaning out the Capitol holding cell as we speak!

OH OH OH!

Where the heck is OCD???

I'm here 40.

I think this is his 'Mueller Out' speech. Very odd that he's speaking from the DOJ, I doubt he addresses a damn thing that we on the left have questions about. I just hope Trump and Barr haven't scripted something for him to regurgitate.

Yes and I heard Putin wrote the statement for him!!!

Of course he did...

If it's bad for Trump in anyway, you'll cry foul. If it's generic or positive for Trump, you'll claim victory. If it is just his goodbye, you will still spin it into something it's not.

I don't know what he's going to say, I am interested but I'm more interested in his congressional testimony.

Well since Trump has fallen in love with Kim Jun Un it sounds like he's been writing some of Trump's speeches. So nothing would surprise me at this point.

yea, instead of asking trump about certain things, we should just ask Kim.

Someone just told me that Trump has ordered the Zumwalt into the Capitol Tidal Basin!!!!