Tag: Mueller Report

Barr says Mueller report will be released ‘within a week’

Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers on Tuesday that he will release a public version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “within a week.”

Barr also said that the redactions made to the report would be color-coded and footnoted so that the public knows why the Justice Department decided to redact those portions.

“The process is going along very well,” Barr said during testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee on the Justice Department’s fiscal 2020 budget request. “My original timetable of being able to release this by mid-April stands.”

View the complete April 9 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Road ahead: Barr testifying on DOJ budget, likely to get grilled about Mueller report

House to vote on net neutrality bill before Democratic retreat, Senate picks up pace on nominations after going nuclear

All eyes will be on the House and Senate Appropriations committees this week — but not necessarily because of President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget blueprint.

Attorney General William P. Barr is scheduled to testify Tuesday in the House and Wednesday in the Senate about the Justice Department’s budget, but the conversation is sure to turn to his handling of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.

Barr has come under criticism over reports that Mueller’s findings showed more evidence against the president, particularly regarding possible obstruction of justice, than the attorney general suggested in his four-page letter summarizing the report’s key conclusions.

View the complete April 8 article by Niels Lesniewski on The Roll Call website here.

Road ahead: Barr testifying on DOJ budget, likely to get grilled about Mueller report

House to vote on net neutrality bill before Democratic retreat, Senate picks up pace on nominations after going nuclear

All eyes will be on the House and Senate Appropriations committees this week — but not necessarily because of President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget blueprint.

Attorney General William P. Barr is scheduled to testify Tuesday in the House and Wednesday in the Senate about the Justice Department’s budget, but the conversation is sure to turn to his handling of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.

Barr has come under criticism over reports that Mueller’s findings showed more evidence against the president, particularly regarding possible obstruction of justice, than the attorney general suggested in his four-page letter summarizing the report’s key conclusions.

View the complete April 8 article by Lindsey McPherson and Niels Nlesniewski on The Roll Call website here.

The NAFTA Report That Could Do More Damage Than Mueller

With all the coverage of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and still-confidential report, President Donald Trump’s political future does not appear to be closely tied to the Russia investigation. Without ground-shaking conclusions that completely reframed his presidency for the Republican Party and is leadership, there’s never been much chance that the report could lead to him being removed from office.

But there’s another forthcoming report that really could do serious damage to the president, even if there’s been almost no coverage of it so far. It’s a report from the International Trade Commission on the future effects of Trump renegotiated version of NAFTA, which the president calls the USMCA

As the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale reported, the ITC report is set to come out on April 19. And few expect it to show much of an upside for the United States or Trump.

Dale wrote:

At best, experts say, the ITC report expected by April 19 is likely to show a very small positive impact.

View the complete April 4 article by Cody Fenwick on the National Memo website here.

New hints of the Mueller report: Did Trump simply get rolled by the Russians?

Despite the fact that William Barr had made public comments denigrating the Mueller investigation and clearly auditioned for the job with a spurious memo suggesting that it was almost impossible for a president to obstruct justice, he was confirmed as Donald Trump’s new attorney general with little difficulty. After what had happened with Jeff Sessions, it was understood that Trump would never again stand for an AG recusing himself from any investigation of the president. So everyone knew that Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election would be in the hands of someone who was unlikely to be an honest broker.

Nonetheless, most of us gave Barr the benefit of the doubt. I wrote about Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had been a conservative supporter of Richard Nixon. He was coerced into taking the job by White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, who told him, “We need you, Leon” — assuming he would be loyal to the president. When Jaworski saw the evidence against Nixon, however, he was appalled and moved forward with the investigation. I thought maybe that could happen with Barr too.

I should have known better. Barr was a very political attorney general during George H.W. Bush’s administration, recommending pardons for all the guilty players in the Iran-Contra case, showing that he wasn’t going to be one of those weaklings who saw the Nixon pardon as setting a bad example for the country. I should have realized that this wasn’t a case of someone who’d spent too much time watching Sean Hannity and was slightly out of it. Barr’s been a rock-solid right-winger for decades.

View the complete April 5 article by Heather Digby Parton with Salon on the AlterNet website here.

‘Tide has turned’ against Bill Barr as GOP lawmakers increasingly back away from Trump’s hand-picked AG: NBC analyst

NBC News national affairs analyst John Heileman explained how Attorney General Bill Barr is losing the support of Senate Republicans on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” on Thursday.

Host Lawrence O’Donnell showed a tweet by Sen. Chuck Grassley:

ChuckGrassley

✔@ChuckGrassley

I support release of the Mueller report

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24.8K people are talking about this

“He could have easily not put that tweet out today,” O’Donnell noted. “He used to be the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee which would have had direct jurisdiction, he would have been receiving these letters from Barr, so he’s an important voice among Republicans on this kind of issue.”

View the complete April 5 article by Bob Brigham with Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Some on Mueller’s Team Say Report Was More Damaging Than Barr Revealed

WASHINGTON — Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

Mr. Barr has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter.

View the complete April 3 article by Nicholas Fandos, Michael S. Schmidt and Mark Mazzetti on The New York Times website here.

House panel approves subpoena for Mueller report

The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday voted to authorize a subpoena to compel the Justice Department to hand over special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report to Congress, intensifying a power struggle with the Trump administration.

In a party-line vote, the committee voted 24-17 to approve a resolution authorizing subpoenas for Mueller’s report, including accompanying exhibits and other attachments, as well as its underlying evidence. The resolution also authorizes the committee’s Democratic chairman to subpoena testimony related to the special counsel’s report.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said he would give Attorney General William Barr time to produce the final, unredacted report to Congress before issuing the subpoena; however he did not provide a timeline on when that would happen.

View the complete April 3 article by Morgan Chalfant and Olivia beavers on The Hill website here.

A sudden White House change of heart: Trump doesn’t want America to see Mueller’s report anymore

As sure as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, we all knew Donald Trump’s dalliance with transparency on Robert Mueller’s findings would come to a screeching halt once someone explained to him the difference between Attorney General William Barr’s 4-page hack job and Mueller’s 400-page-plus report. Now that Trump has learned those other 396 pages aren’t all dazzling pictures of him, he’s turning his ship around.

Just two weeks after Trump was arguing for public release—”I don’t mind. … Let them see it.”—Trump minds. Trump has now gone from “it wouldn’t bother me at all” on March 25 to his Monday declaration that Democrats are “crazed” about the report and “it will never be enough.” In case anyone mistook his meaning, he twitter screamed on Tuesday morning: “NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM!”

Trump topped off that tweet a couple hours later by retweeting a Fox News clip in which Alan Dershowitz argued that Barr doesn’t have any legal obligation to publicly release the report at all.

View the complete April 2 article by Kerry Eleveld of the Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

Questions mount over Mueller, Barr and obstruction

Questions are mounting over special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice as lawmakers on Capitol Hill await the release of his report.

While Barr’s four-page letter to Congress on Sunday silenced suspicions Mueller would charge Trump or members of his campaign with conspiring with the Russian government, its contents only amplified the mystery surrounding the obstruction inquiry.

It remains unclear why Mueller declined to make a decision one way or another on whether Trump impeded his investigation, and Democrats have grown increasingly skeptical of Attorney General William Barr’s judgment that the evidence was insufficient to accuse Trump of obstruction. They also argue he is not a neutral arbiter.

View the complete March 30 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.