Attorney General William Barr defended his summary of the “principal conclusions” of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Wednesday after it was revealed Mueller sent him a letter criticizing its rollout.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Barr said his hotly-debated letter to Congress on March 24 was necessary because “the body politic was in a high state of agitation and the bottom line of Mueller’s investigation was particularly related to collusion.”
After Mueller submitted his report on March 22, Barr said he wanted to get information out as quickly as possible due to speculation about Mueller’s findings running rampant, “so I didn’t feel that it was in the public interest to allow this to go on for several weeks without saying anything.”
Barr specifically called out “former government officials who were confidently predicting that the president and members of his family were going to be indicted.” That is likely a reference to former Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan’s claims in March that “I wouldn’t be surprised if, for example, this week on Friday — not knowing anything about it — but Friday is the day the grand jury indictments come down” and that “if anybody from the Trump family, extended family, is going to be indicted, it would be the final act of Mueller’s investigation.” No one from the Trump family was charged by Mueller.
Barr also told Congress that “people were suggesting if it took any time to turn around the report and get it out it would mean the president was in legal jeopardy … so I decided to simply state what the bottom line conclusions were.”
Barr’s letter to Congress on March 24 stated that Mueller had not found any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but had left the door open on obstruction of justice. “We used the language from the report to state those bottom line conclusions,” Barr said. The letter further explained that Barr, along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, had then determined that obstruction had not been committed by Trump.
Barr also emphasized the fact that he “offered Bob Mueller the opportunity to review that letter before it went out,” but said “he declined.”
In the letter dated March 27, which was released by House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., on Wednesday, Mueller objected to Barr’s March 24 summary because it “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the 22-month investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump.
[READ: Robert Mueller’s redacted Russia report]
Mueller asked Barr to alleviate public confusion by releasing the report’s introduction and executive summary for each volume.
Barr said he called Mueller afterwards. “He was very clear with me that he was not suggesting that we had misrepresented his report,” Barr testified. “I told Bob that I was not interested in putting out summaries and I wasn’t going to put out the report piecemeal. I wanted to get the whole report out and I thought summaries by very definition regardless of who prepared them would be under inclusive and we would have a series of different debates and public discord over each bit of information that went out. And I wanted to get everything out at once and we should start working on that.”
Afterwards, Barr said he got to work on a follow-up letter to Congress “explaining the process” and stressing “the March 24th letter was not a summary of the report but a statement of the principal conclusions.”
The full Mueller report was released with redactions earlier this month.
