William Barr Sends Troubling Signals Ahead of Mueller Report Release
Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2019 20:20:14 +0000
The Mueller report has been sitting in the Justice Department for nearly two weeks. Attorney general William Barr told Congress Wednesday he’s hoping the public will finally get a look at the 300-plus page document sometime within the next week, ending a bizarre period of dissembling and fumbling by Barr that has left America with more questions than answers about the seriousness of what Mueller uncovered.
That public release, when it comes, will thankfully end the current liminal period where Barr’s own summary of the report—which he subsequently denied was a summary—has stood as the only public statement on the final findings of a 22-month probe that led to charges against dozens of individuals—including Russian intelligence officers—and yielded around $50 million in forfeitures and fines, yet evidently stopped short of indicting the president or his family themselves. So far, the public has seen less than 70 words of Mueller’s own conclusions, not a single complete sentence among them.
Yet two days of testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday and Wednesday have done little to calm growing concerns that Barr is acting to obfuscate the worst findings of Mueller’s two-year probe as special counsel.
The investigation was hardly the wide-ranging, any-and-all-crimes hunt that critics had alleged.
At nearly every turn, Barr stonewalled and seemed to contradict himself or Justice Department precedent. He argued consistently that the report was nuanced enough he couldn’t discuss or release it piecemeal, even though he himself rushed out his “topline conclusions” in just 48 hours. He declined to explain Mueller’s reasoning for refusing to make a “traditional prosecutorial decision” on the question of whether Donald Trump obstructed justice, an important answer given how Barr stepped in to offer his own verdict—even as he quoted Mueller saying the report “does not exonerate” the president on obstruction. And, perhaps most confounding, Barr said he did not plan to ask for a court’s permission to release the grand jury testimony included in Mueller’s report, as was done in Watergate and Whitewater.
Barr’s performance on Capitol Hill deepened the sense of unease about the coming unveiling of the Mueller report, and how much of it would be made public. In the days since Barr released his summary, Trump wrongly declared “total EXONERATION,” while Mueller’s own team appears to be whispering about their unhappiness with Barr’s summary. While their report concluded that the Trump campaign’s behavior in 2016 fell short of a provable conspiracy, that doesn’t mean the behavior wasn’t troubling.
Particularly worrisome, Barr seemed to be adopting the president’s call for “investigating the investigators,” raising the specter—long pushed by figures like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos and the fever dreamers on Fox News—that the whole premise of the FBI’s 2016 investigation, codenamed CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, was somehow illegitimate. The theory involves some vague and incorrect dot-connecting between the FISA surveillance warrant that targeted Carter Page (which began months before he joined the campaign), the so-called Steele Dossier (which even Senator Lindsey Graham has said he urged his Senate colleague John McCain to turn over to the FBI back in 2016), the “unmasking” scandal-that-wasn’t, and the supposed corruption of FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page.
Trump himself has trumpeted the conspiracy theory previously—and did so again Wednesday morning, saying that the Russia probe was “an illegal investigation.” As he told reporters, “It was started illegally. Everything about it was crooked. Every single thing about it was crooked.”
Barr seemed to buy into the swampy end of the conspiracy theory during his testimony Wednesday, saying he believed “spying did occur,” and “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.” Barr cited no new information, or previously unknown evidence, to back his conclusion. “I believe there is a basis for my concern, but I’m not going to discuss the basis for my concern,” Barr said.
If anything, Mueller’s investigation has shown just how right the FBI was.
Hearing that line of commentary from the nation’s top law enforcement officer was distressing, given that all public evidence has shown that the special counsel investigation of Trump’s campaign was by the book. The idea of a deep state conspiracy to undermine then-candidate Trump is laughable given the public evidence, not the least of which was how silent the FBI and Justice Department actually kept throughout the campaign. As Strzok himself has pointed out, had he actually been trying to undermine Trump, he could have picked up the phone and called any reporter in the country at any point during the campaign. He didn’t.
If anything, Mueller’s investigation has shown just how right the FBI was to be interested in figures associated with the Trump campaign in 2016. The campaign chair and deputy chair were both involved in a money laundering conspiracy while working as unregistered foreign agents of Ukraine during the campaign; national security advisor Michael Flynn was involved in his own work on behalf of the government of Turkey; the candidate’s personal lawyer was engaged in his own money laundering and tax fraud scheme, while attempting to do business with the Russian government on the candidate’s behalf and lying about it to the American public. Any one of the above would have been a normal political scandal; the combination makes Donald Trump’s campaign the most criminal political enterprise in modern American history.
In fact, after enduring literally years of presidential shouts of “WITCH HUNT!” the wrap-up of Mueller’s probe has made clear that the investigation was hardly the wide-ranging, any-and-all-crimes hunt that critics had alleged.
Mueller was no Ken Starr, an independent counsel who set out to investigate a decades-old failed real estate development and eventually brought charges against the president for an affair that hadn’t even occurred when Starr began his case.
Mueller’s approach was targeted and narrow; he won guilty pleas and overwhelming trial court convictions in the cases he did bring. He was rigorous in his legal definitions; Barr noted in his summary that Mueller used an exacting and high bar for “collusion.” And his overall manner conservative, referring out “non-core” criminal matters to other investigators.
Given Mueller’s conservative approach, it’s all the more important that Barr let the public see the special counsel’s own words and his own decisionmaking—especially given that Mueller went out of his way to say he “does not exonerate” Trump.
Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a contributing editor for WIRED and the author, among other works, of Mueller's War, available on Scribd. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.