Legal experts and lawmakers say the attorney general is mishandling the special counsel’s report.
William Barr is just seven weeks into his new job and he’s already in the middle of a gathering political storm over special counsel Robert Mueller’s 400-page report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
His career legacy could be on the line. This isn’t Barr’s first stint as attorney general, after all. And before returning to the Justice Department in February, he became an elite private lawyer and fixture of conservative legal circles. So many in Washington expected the 68-year-old former George H.W. Bush appointee to shore up a Justice Department reeling from the president’s verbal assaults on his own senior appointees, seasoned career federal prosecutors and FBI agents.
Barr inherited the Russia probe from his predecessor, Jeff Sessions. But his carefully built reputation is now at risk, legal experts and lawmakers in both parties say, as Mueller’s famously tight-lipped former prosecutors grouse to associates about how the attorney general has portrayed their work.
“He’s an institutionalist and loves the Department of Justice and the only thing he has to lose at this point in his career is his reputation,” former FBI director James Comey told CNN this week. Comey added that, for now, Barr “deserves the benefit of the doubt.”
Some members of Congress are even asking whether Barr himself has broken the law, saying his characterization of the Mueller probe allowed Trump and his allies to build a public narrative clearing the president of any wrongdoing — all without actually releasing a full version of the special counsel’s findings.
“If it turns out that he has obstructed justice by how he has handled the Mueller report that will be a deep stain on his legacy,” said Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat and member of the House Judiciary Committee, who cautioned that Barr’s conduct is difficult to evaluate without seeing the full report.
Barr’s troubles started last month when he released the first in a series of three letters to Congress about the much-anticipated conclusions of the Mueller probe.
In the first statement, issued just after 5 p.m. on a Friday, Barr confirmed for lawmakers that the Russia investigation that had consumed Washington since the start of Trump’s presidency was indeed over and that he’d be spending the weekend working to release Mueller’s “principal conclusions.” A senior DOJ official also quickly confirmed that Mueller was not recommending any additional criminal indictments, bolstering the hopes of the president and his allies that the report would clear his name.
The next Barr disclosure came that Sunday night, in the form of a four-page letter declaring Mueller had not established there was a criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to meddle in the last presidential election. The attorney general further explained that Mueller took no position on whether Trump obstructed justice, though he quoted the special counsel as noting, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Barr pointedly noted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had appointed Mueller and long supervised his operation, agreed with his conclusion that the evidence Mueller had amassed wasn’t sufficient to charge Trump with an obstruction-of-justice crime.
Five days later, as Trump celebrated the Mueller findings as a “Total EXONERATION” clearing him from scandal, Barr weighed in again with a new two-page letter to Congress. This time, the attorney general outlined a fresh timetable for reviewing and redacting the entire 400-page report that put him on track to release it to lawmakers by mid-April “or sooner.”
Barr referenced the special counsel too, saying he was consulting with Mueller to identify and redact several categories of sensitive information. The attorney general also offered his first public recognition of the controversy he’d helped ignite by calling out “some media reports and other public statements mischaracterizing” his second letter as a “summary” of Mueller’s investigation. That letter wasn’t intended to be “an exhaustive recounting” of the special counsel’s work but only a synopsis of its “bottom line,” the attorney general wrote.
“Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own,” Barr added. “I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion.”
But the political damage might already have been done.
Greg Brower, the former head of FBI’s congressional affairs office, called it “ill-advised” for Barr to send the second letter offering up principal conclusions.
“It was just not an effective communication,” Brower said.
Barr only made things worse with his follow-up letter last Friday that seemed to walk back the idea that he’d just summarized Mueller’s main findings. “The third letter was intending to clean up the second and everyone was confused,” Brower said.
David Kris, a former assistant attorney general for national security under President Barack Obama, said Barr was in an impossible position when he first got Mueller’s findings and the pressure was building for some kind of an explanation for what had just been delivered.
“Had he not said anything, of course, he also would have been criticized,” said Kris, who now leads the intelligence consulting firm Culper Partners.
But Kris said Barr could still find himself in trouble if the release of the Mueller report shows that his March 24 letter was “materially misleading or contained material omissions.”
“And we don’t know that yet,” Kris cautioned.
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Seven weeks into his new job, William Barr is already in the middle of a gathering political storm over the special counsel’s 400-page report. His career legacy could be on the line https://t.co/KfnVJ6diPG
— POLITICO (@politico) April 6, 2019
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