Fact Checker: What Attorney General Barr said vs. what the Mueller report said
By Salvador Rizzo Salvador Rizzo Reporter for The Fact Checker Email Bio Follow April 19 at 3:00 AM Before the special counsel’s report on Russia and President Trump was released to the public, Attorney General William P. Barr made several statements about what was in its 448 pages.
The Post reported that “members of Mueller’s team have complained to close associates that the evidence they gathered on obstruction was alarming and significant,” and more acute than Barr had indicated. Left out was a key statement from Mueller that came right before what Barr quoted in his letter: “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...
Barr at some points in his news conference used the word “collusion,” which is not a legal term for a crime. Questions of legality aside, was there secret cooperation between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government? The report says Kilimnik and Manafort believed the plan would “require candidate Trump’s assent to succeed .”
Mueller also documented an instance in which Trump’s public comments closely coincided with a Russian intelligence agency’s moves to hack Clinton’s emails. The Justice Department official we spoke to emphasized Mueller’s bottom-line decision not to bring charges of illegal coordination or conspiracy and said it was not reasonable to consider the contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians as collusion in any sense.
But Mueller spent nearly half of the report laying out a sustained effort by Trump to derail the investigation, including an effort by the president to have him removed. Barr in his March 24 letter: “The Special Counsel’s decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.”
Trump’s attorneys argued that the president could not obstruct justice by exercising his constitutional authority to fire Comey. Mueller rejected that argument, and his report uses suggestive language about Congress’s role in this debate. “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,” the report says. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.
Barr’s decision to share an advance copy of the Mueller report with White House lawyers and Trump’s personal attorneys departs from the precedent set by independent counsel Kenneth Starr in 1998, as The Post’s Rosalind S. Helderman writes. However, Barr said he shared an advance copy of the report with Trump’s lawyers consistent with “long-standing practice.” The last time an independent or special counsel was appointed to investigate a sitting president, the opposite happened: Starr said no.
Asked about this, the Justice Department official emphasized that the president chose not to assert executive privilege, turned over reams of documents and directed aides to testify. That’s significant, indeed. But to call this full cooperation is highly misleading. One of the blanks Trump left unfilled concerned the Trump Tower Moscow project, according to the report.
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