Hefty Mueller report promised Thursday
WASHINGTON – The waiting should end Thursday.
Attorney General William Barr plans to release the final report of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to sway the 2016 election Thursday, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said Monday. The investigation examined links between the Kremlin and President Donald Trump’s campaign, and the report could detail connections that did not produce criminal charges.
The 400-page document, anticipated since last month when the attorney general disclosed a barebones summary of its major conclusions, will be transmitted to
Congress and made public at roughly the same time. Barr said he will keep parts of the report secret.
For weeks, Democrats demanded that Barr make the full, unredacted report public while President Donald Trump seized on its major conclusions to declare “complete vindication.”
Trump said he believes the report should be made public but suggested its disclosure might not lift the cloud the investigation cast over his administration. “The Radical Left Democrats will never be satisfied with anything we give them,” he wrote Monday on Twitter.
Trump criticized the inquiry again Monday as a partisan investigation that “fabricated the whole Russia Hoax.”
Barr told lawmakers in a four-page summary last month that Mueller’s inquiry found insufficient evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign
and the Kremlin. Mueller did not reach a conclusion on the other major question of the 22-month investigation: whether the president sought to obstruct the inquiry. Barr determined that the evidence offered by Mueller did not amount to a crime.
In one of the few passages from the report to become public, Barr quoted Mueller as saying that on the question of obstruction, “this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Since Mueller delivered the document to Barr last month, a Justice Department team – including Mueller’s prosecutors – has been sifting through the document to remove secret grand jury information, material related to ongoing investigations, classified information and other material related to uncharged people who were swept up in the wide-ranging investigation. Barr said he would remove four types of information from the report and colorcode the redactions to signal the reasons for secrecy.
Barr canceled a scheduled appearance Wednesday in Cincinnati, where he was to take part in a law-enforcement-related event.
Mueller’s investigation ended when he delivered the report to Barr, but a number of spinoff investigations are proceeding in Virginia, Washington and New York.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, DCalif., and the chairmen of six committees called for Barr to provide Mueller’s unaltered report to Congress. The Judiciary Committee voted April 3 to authorize Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., to subpoena the report. Nadler said he would issue the subpoena if Barr provided a redacted report.
Mueller’s inquiry began after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. Mueller took over a counterintelligence investigation that began the summer before when the FBI started seeing evidence of contacts between Trump associates and the Kremlin, which was working to interfere with the presidential election.
Mueller’s office filed charges against 34 people and organizations and convicted several top aides to Trump, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
No charges were filed that accused Americans of coordinating with Russians to alter the election.