The Barr letter is not the Mueller report—it's a gift to Donald Trump
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On Friday afternoon, Attorney General William Barr announced that he was in receipt of the concluding document from special counsel Robert Mueller. After 40 hours of tense silence and speculation, Barr delivered a letter to Congress on Sunday providing a “sThe Barr letter is not the Mueller report—it's a gift to Donald Trump
On Friday afternoon, Attorney General William Barr announced that he was in receipt of the concluding document from special counsel Robert Mueller. After 40 hours of tense silence and speculation, Barr delivered a letter to Congress on Sunday providing a “summary” of the contents of Mueller’s statement. In his letter, Barr states that Mueller concluded that, while Russia deliberately interfered in the 2016 election both by planting false stories in social media and by hacking into computers to “obtain” emails, the special counsel “did not find that any U.S. person or Trump campaign official or associate conspired or knowingly coordinated” with the Russian effort. On the topic of obstruction, the letter states that Mueller did something unusual: He laid out a number of actions that possibly represented obstruction, but did not provide indictments. As a result, Barr, in consultation with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, concluded that the “evidence was not sufficient to conclude the President committed an obstruction of justice offense.” All indications are that there are to be no more indictments, including no sealed indictments, resulting from the special counsel investigation. No further actions will result. As might be expected, the contents of the letter have resulted in both wild celebration—and wild accusations—from the Right, with Trump claiming “total exoneration,” and multiple Republicans in both the Senate and the House accusing both Democrats and the media of “lying” and leading the public on a two-year, what else, “witch hunt.” On the other hand, it’s immediately notable that Barr’s fewer-than-four-page letter contains not a single full sentence from the document produced by Mueller, and one of the few fragments that is provided states that, “while this report does not conclude the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him”—in stark disagreement with Trump’s claims. The letter from Barr provides a list of hefty statistics about the number of documents examined, subpoenas deployed, and witnesses questioned in the course of the investigation, all of which only makes Barr’s highly abbreviated summary even less satisfying. On the issue of obstruction, Barr’s letter does not say that Mueller left it to the attorney general to determine charges, no matter how it’s being framed in reports. It says only that Mueller “determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgement,” and then Barr and Rosenstein “determined that the evidence developed … was not sufficient to establish” a crime. That is a very different thing. The description of “collusion” in the letter is very tightly prescribed, leaving off the table entire areas of possible cooperation with Russia, and describing the situation in very black-and-white terms that may not reflect the findings from the special counsel. Read more