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: “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. Mueller himself notes this in a March 27 letter to Barr, saying that Barr’s letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.” In noting why Barr thought the president’s intent in impeding the investigation was insufficient to establish obstruction, Barr selectively quotes Mueller to make it sound as if his analysis was much closer to Barr’s analysis than it actually was:īarr quotes Mueller saying the evidence didn’t establish that Trump was personally involved in crimes related to Russian election interference, and Barr then claims that Mueller found that fact relevant to whether the president had the intent to obstruct justice.īut Mueller’s quote is taken from a section in which he describes other improper motives Trump could have had and notes: “The injury to the integrity of the justice system is the same regardless of whether a person committed an underlying wrong.” None of that is in Barr’s letter.Īs a result of Barr’s March 24 letter, the public and Congress were misled. He instead selectively quotes Mueller in a way that makes it sound-falsely-as if Mueller’s decision stemmed from legal/factual issues specific to Trump’s actions.īut, in fact, Mueller finds considerable evidence that several of Trump’s actions detailed in the report meet the elements of obstruction, and Mueller’s constitutional and prudential issues with indicting a sitting president would preclude indictment regardless of what he found. Mueller’s report says he chose not to decide whether Trump broke the law because there’s an official DoJ opinion that indicting a sitting president is unconstitutional, and because of concerns about impacting the president’s ability to govern and pre-empting possible impeachment.īarr’s letter doesn’t mention those issues when explaining why Mueller chose not to make a prosecutorial decision. That letter selectively quotes and summarizes points in Mueller’s report in misleading ways. On Tuesday, he went at it again, this time, with a more specified and lengthy bullseye drawn directly over the charlatan heading up the Justice Department.Īttorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented key aspects of Mueller’s report and decisions in the investigation, which has helped further the president’s false narrative about the investigation.Īfter receiving Mueller’s report, Barr wrote and released a letter on March 24 describing Barr’s own decision not to indict the president for obstruction of justice. He answered his first bold tweetstorm with another, doubling down on his original assessment. Of course, President Tweety McRager applied the usual schoolyard nicknames.Īnd then, as we’ve come to see in Trumpland, a Trump-loyal challenger was immediately offered up against Amash’s seat. For his troubles, Amash has been excoriated by party leadership, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy sneering that Amash was seeking attention.