Nadler: Barr is 'biased' and Mueller's Trump Russia report must be released
Senior Democrats are keeping up pressure on attorney general William Barr to release the full Mueller report, claiming collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia happened “in plain sight”.
More than two weeks after Robert Mueller, the special counsel conducting the Russia inquiry, handed his final report to Barr, there is no sign of any let-up in Democratic demands. On the Sunday talk shows the charge was led by Jerry Nadler, chair of the House judiciary committee, who said trust should not be placed in Barr’s four-page summary of the report because the attorney general was “biased”.
“Remember [Barr] is a biased person. He is someone who is an agent of the administration, is an appointee, a political appointee of the president whose interests he may very well be protecting here,” Nadler told CBS’s Face the Nation.
In his summary of Mueller’s work, released two weeks ago, Barr quoted a sentence from the finished report: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Nadler, backed by Adam Schiff, chair of the House intelligence committee, said that was not the end of the story.
In recent days, unnamed members of Mueller’s team have expressed irritation in the press, complaining that the report’s findings were more damning than Barr indicated.
Schiff told CNN’s State of the Union that there was “ample evidence of collusion in plain sight”. He said the oversight role of Congress operated to a different standard to the criminal test of “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
“What we are talking about here is the difference between conduct that rises to the level of criminality and conduct that is deeply unethical, unpatriotic and corrupt that may not be criminal,” he said, adding: “It’s our responsibility to root out fraud, corruption, waste, abuse whether it rises to the level of criminality or not.”
Despite the Democrats’ determination to hold Trump’s bone spurs to the fire, the president is clearly feeling he has the upper hand, given the favorable summary produced by his handpicked attorney general.
On Sunday morning he lashed out in the wake of the Times story, tweet
ing: “Looks like Bob Mueller’s team of 13 Trump Haters & Angry Democrats are illegally leaking information to the press while the Fake News Media make up their own stories with or without sources – sources no longer matter to our corrupt & dishonest Mainstream Media, they are a Joke!”
Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, struck a similarly bullish pose on CBS. He said he would like Congress to be given “all the information … everything” from the Mueller report.
The offer was however less generous than it sounded. Giuliani swiftly went on to say that he had no control over what Barr would decide in terms of redactions.
Many Democrats and legal observers see Barr as an improper actor in the handling of the Mueller report. Almost a year before the special counsel concluded his investigation, Barr wrote a memo in which he reached the conclusion that Trump had committed no obstruction of justice and Mueller’s probe was “fatally misconceived”.