Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Barr defends his actions on Mueller filing
‘Didn’t exonerate’ Trump, he testifies to Senate panel
WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr pushed back Wednesday at complaints over his handling of the Russia investigation report, saying he didn’t exonerate President Donald Trump because that’s not the job of the Justice Department.
Testifying for the first time since releasing Mueller’s report, Barr faced sharp questioning from Senate Democrats who accused him of making misleading comments and of trying to protect the president.
Barr separately informed the House Judiciary Committee that he would not appear for its scheduled hearing today because of the panel’s insistence that he be questioned by committee lawyers as well as lawmakers.
At Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee session, Barr said he had been surprised Mueller did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice and that he had felt compelled to step in
with his own judgment that the president had committed no crime.
“I’m not really sure of his reasoning,” Barr said of Mueller’s obstruction analysis, which neither accused the president of a crime nor exonerated him. If Mueller felt that shouldn’t make a decision on whether to bring charges, Barr added, “then he shouldn’t have investigated. That was the time to pull up.”
Though Mueller reached no conclusion on obstruction, he did report that his probe established no criminal conspiracy between the Trump team and Russia. Barr asserted that Trump was “falsely accused” during the investigation and that the president therefore lacked the criminal intent required to commit obstruction.
“I didn’t exonerate. I said that we did not believe that there was sufficient evidence to establish an obstruction offense which is the job of the Justice Department, and the job of the Justice Department is now over,” Barr said.
Barr was also perturbed by a private letter that Mueller, a longtime friend, sent him March 27 complaining that the attorney general did not provide the proper context of the special counsel’s findings in a four-page memo summarizing the report’s main conclusions. The attorney general called the note “a bit snitty.”
“I said ‘Bob, what’s with the letter? Just pick up the phone and call me if there is an issue,’” Barr said.
Democrats on Wednesday accused Barr of lying under oath last month when he denied that Mueller’s team was unhappy with how their work had been characterized.
Barr downplayed the special counsel’s complaints, saying they were mostly about process, not substance, while raising a few objections of his own in the other direction. He said Mueller did not, as requested, identify grand jury material in his report when he submitted it, slowing the public release of the report as the Justice Department worked to black out sensitive information.
“His concern was he wanted more out,” Barr said. He said Mueller did not say that Barr had inaccurately characterized the investigation.
Barr also said Mueller’s letter followed days of negative media coverage about the report and suggested that there might be a connection.
“My view of events was that there was a lot of criticism of the special counsel for the ensuing few days, and on Thursday, I got this letter,” he said.
Barr also insisted that once Mueller submitted his report, his work was done and the document became “my baby.”
“It was my decision how and when to make it public,” Barr said. “Not Bob Mueller’s.”
Trump tweeted Wednesday that the probe was “The greatest con-job in the history of American Politics!”
In an interview Wednesday night on Fox Business Network, Trump said he heard Barr “performed incredibly well.” Trump also blasted some of the Democratic senators who questioned Barr, accusing them of “ranting and raving like lunatics, frankly.”
REFERENCE TO CLINTON
Wednesday’s Senate hearing gave Barr his most extensive opportunity to date to defend recent Justice Department actions, including a news conference before the report’s release and his decision to release a brief letter on the investigation’s findings two days after getting the report.
But the hearing, which included three Democratic presidential candidates, also laid bare the partisan divide over the handling of Mueller’s report.
Some Republicans focused on the president’s 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton’s email and campaign practices and what they argued has been a lack of investigation of them.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the committee chairman, pointed to “the other campaign” and Clinton’s email server as well as the origins of the special counsel’s investigation.
As he opened the hearing, Graham read from text messages between former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in 2016 to prove that the people investigating the president “hated Trump’s guts,” as he put it. He also returned to the Democrat-financed dossier on Trump assembled by Christopher Steele and an eavesdropping warrant issued against Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“This committee is going to look long and hard in how this all started,” Graham said. “We’re going to look at the FISA warrant process. Did Russia provide Christopher Steele the information about Trump that turned out to be garbage, that was used to get a warrant on an American citizen? And if so, how did the system fail?”
Citing the same text messages, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the investigation into Trump was an attempt by unelected FBI officials “to overturn a democratic election. And to my mind that’s the real crisis here.”
Other Republican senators accused Democrats of a double standard for advocating that James Comey, the FBI director who led the investigation into Clinton’s private email server, be fired because of his handling of that and then complaining when Trump eventually did dismiss him. And Republicans pressed the argument that former President Barack Obama should have done more to counter Russian interference in the 2016 election when he was in office.
Democrats, for their part, moved to impugn the attorney general’s credibility. Some also called for Barr to resign, or to recuse himself from Justice Department investigations that have been spun off from Mueller’s probe.
“I think the American public can see quite well that you are biased in this situation and you have not been objective and that would arguably be a conflict of interest,” said Sen. Kamala Harris of California, one of the Democratic contenders for president.
They also pressed him on whether he had misled Congress last month when, at an unrelated congressional hearing, he professed ignorance about complaints from the special counsel’s team. Barr suggested that he had not lied because he was in touch with Mueller himself and not Mueller’s team.
Unswayed, Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont said, “Mr. Barr, I feel your answer was purposefully misleading, and I think others do too.”
Neither side broke much new ground Wednesday on the specifics of Mueller’s investigation, though Barr did make clear his firm conviction that there was no prosecutable case against the president for obstruction of justice.
He was asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s top Democrat, about an episode recounted in Mueller’s report in which Trump pressed White House counsel Donald McGahn to seek the removal of Mueller on conflict-of-interest grounds. Trump then asked McGahn to deny a news report that such a directive had been given.
Barr responded, “There’s something very different firing a special counsel outright, which suggests ending an investigation, and having a special counsel removed for conflict — which suggests you’re going to have another special counsel.”
Barr also said the president did not think he was telling McGahn to effectively write a false statement, noting that McGahn had already talked to Mueller’s investigators when Trump is said to have made the request of him.
“You still have a situation where the president essentially tries to change the lawyer’s account in order to prevent further criticism of himself,” Feinstein said.
“Well, that’s not a crime,” Barr responded.
“So you can, in this situation, instruct someone to lie?” Feinstein said.
“To be obstruction of justice, the lie has to be tied to impairing the evidence in a particular proceeding,” Barr said.
He suggested that “if the president is being falsely accused, which the evidence now suggests that the allegations against him were false,” firing Mueller would not necessarily be problematic.
“That is not a corrupt motive for replacing an independent counsel,” Barr said.
Also Wednesday, Barr told senators that he suspected his review of the FBI’s conduct would turn up more intelligence collection than “a single confidential informant and a FISA warrant” — suggesting it was “anemic” to rely on just that much information in a counterintelligence probe.
“It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort, if that was the counterintelligence effort designed to stop the threat as it’s been represented,” Barr said.
Barr also told senators that he has already assigned members of his staff to review allegations that there was “spying” conducted on the Trump campaign before the 2016 election and that he anticipates reporting to Congress at the conclusion of that inquiry.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Tucker, Mary Clare Jalonick, Chad Day, Michael Balsamo, Jonathan Lemire and Lisa Mascaro of The Associated Press; by Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, Karoun Demirjian and Rosalind S. Helderman of The Washington Post; and by Peter Baker of The New York Times.