House Judiciary Democrats Tuesday morning released the full letter Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent to Attorney General William Barr on March 27, in which he complained that the Attorney General’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance” of the 448-page report his team worked on for more than two years.
The attorney general released a four-page summary outlining the report’s “principal conclusions” to Congress on March 24, two days after receiving the special counsel’s report.
In it, Barr stated that Mueller was unable to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that he did not conclude whether the President obstructed justice.
After watching the media put the worst possible spin on his investigation for nearly two years, Mueller expressed frustration with Barr’s summary because of how it was being spun by the media.
“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions. We communicated that concern to the Department on March 25. There is now 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 investigation.”
Mueller said in his letter that he wanted his office’s “enclosed materials” to be released immediately before the full report, “to alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen.” His materials presumably would have spun a narrative that was much more critical of President Trump.
BREAKING: Read Special Counsel Mueller’s letter to AG Barr: "The summary letter … did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of the Office's work and conclusions." pic.twitter.com/4IhNTJgKGy
— NBC News (@NBCNews) May 1, 2019
During his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Wednesday morning, Barr testified that he had asked Mueller’s office to produce the report to the Department of Justice in a form that would have allowed the 6(e) (grand jury) classified material to be readily redacted in order to expedite its public release. The Special Counsel, he testified, did not indicate that this would be a problem, yet the report came to him without the notations. Team Mueller’s failure to do this resulted in several weeks of work on the DOJ’s side to redact the grand jury and classified material. That is the time period in which Mueller’s “enclosed materials” spinning his report would have been released. Barr, to his credit, didn’t take the bait.
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