Analysis: What Attorney General Barr buried, misrepresented or ignored in clearing Trump
Attorney General William Barr, flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, speaks at a news conference on Thursday. By Philip Bump Philip Bump National correspondent focused largely on the numbers behind politics Email Bio Follow April 18 at 2:19 PM Attorney General William P. Barr has twice ensured that he had the first word on the conclusions drawn by special counsel Robert S.
Earlier this week, the site Just Security detailed a 1989 incident in which Barr, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice offered a summary of an OLC opinion that was later revealed to have skipped over significant details. A review of what Barr said about Mueller’s report on Thursday, compared with what Mueller writes, similarly shows a number of significant differences. Barr’s news conference repeatedly mischaracterizes what the report itself presents, as below.
“Under applicable law, publication of these types of materials would not be criminal unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy,” Barr said. “Here, too, the Special Counsel’s report did not find that any person associated with the Trump campaign illegally participated in the dissemination of the materials.”
“Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination and were not, in the Office’s judgment, appropriate candidates for grants of immunity,” Mueller writes. He notes several legal limits and then adds that “[e]ven when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed, they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete, leading to . . . false-statements charges.
He and Rosenstein “concluded that the evidence developed by the Special Counsel is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” Barr said. He added that they “disagreed with some of the Special Counsel’s legal theories and felt that some of the episodes examined did not amount to obstruction as a matter of law but that they instead “evaluated the evidence as presented by the Special Counsel in reaching our conclusion.
In an effort to bolster his own decision to exonerate Trump, Barr tries to contextualize Trump’s behavior. It’s important to quote this at length. We’ve added boldface for emphasis. “Recognizing that the President would not be interviewed voluntarily, we considered whether to issue a subpoena for his testimony. We viewed the written answers to be inadequate,” the report states. “But at that point, our investigation had made significant progress and had produced substantial evidence for our report.” Ultimately, given the progress that had been made and the evidence elsewhere, they decided against what would have been a lengthy and nasty subpoena fight.
Again, though, the OLC opinion did affect how Mueller approached the obstruction question, as outlined above. Mueller didn’t make a determination about a crime because of how he decided to approach the obstruction question which was itself a function, in part, of what the OLC wrote.
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