Mueller wanted report’s summaries to be released
WASHINGTON — Special Counsel Robert Mueller twice pushed Attorney General William Barr to release more of his team’s investigative findings in late March, citing a gap between Barr’s interpretation of them and their full report, according to a letter from Mueller released Wednesday.
Mueller and his investigators also pressed the Justice Department to include summaries of their work in the hours before Barr released a four-page letter of his own March 24, the new document showed. Barr’s letter allowed President Trump to wrongly claim that he had been vindicated in the Russia investigation.
Mueller’s letter revealed deep concern about how Barr handled the initial release of the special counsel’s findings — which Mueller said created “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,” Mueller wrote.
Members of a Senate panel pushed Barr on Wednesday just after Mueller’s letter was released to explain his decisions about the Russia investigation over the past month and some Democratic lawmakers have demanded his resignation.
The letter, the existence of which the New York Times and the Washington Post revealed late Tuesday, is the first public evidence of widespread concern among Mueller and his team that the attorney general distorted their findings in his initial presentation of them.
It also revealed an extensive back and forth between the special counsel and Barr in the tense days after Mueller delivered a 448-page report to the Justice Department that presented the conclusions of his office’s 22month-long investigation.
A rift between the two men appears to have grown in the weeks since, with Barr challenging the special counsel’s legal analysis on how some of the president’s actions might have amounted to criminal obstruction of justice.