One of the newest spats to erupt in the continuing saga of
the Russia investigation is over Robert Mueller’s letter to Attorney General
William Barr regarding his representation of the Mueller team’s findings. As
with much of the Russia scandal, the details are sufficiently vague that both
sides can claim to be supported by the facts, but Barr’s critics do make valid
points. The release of Mueller's letter and Barr's congressional testimony lead
to more questions that need to be answered.
To recap the situation for those who came in late, on March
24 Barr released a four-page
summary of the Mueller team’s findings. Barr wrote that, with respect to a
criminal conspiracy with the Russians, “the Special Counsel did not find that the
Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia
in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.” Few, if any, serious observers have problems
with this statement.
With respect to the second part of Mueller’s report, the
investigation into possible obstruction of justice by the president, Barr quotes
the report directly, saying, “While this report does not conclude that the president
committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Barr then goes on to say
that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “concluded that the evidence
developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to
establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” Barr
also notes that this determination was made “without regard to, and is not
based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and prosecution
of a sitting president.” Barr further says that Trump’s actions could not be proven
to have “corrupt intent” beyond a reasonable doubt. Barr’s defenders argue
quite reasonably that nothing that Barr wrote in his summary is inaccurate.
As promised in his summary, Barr released a redacted version
of the Mueller report on April 18. Readers quickly discovered that while Barr
had not misstated any facts in his summary, the facts that he had chosen not to
mention changed the characterization of what Mueller and his investigators had
determined. Where Barr correctly said that Mueller found no evidence of a criminal
conspiracy by the Trump campaign, Mueller’s
report found tacit approval of Russia’s actions by the campaign, prefacing its
exoneration with the statement, “Although the investigation established that
the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and
worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit
electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts…” But
this was not criminal behavior. Fair enough.
Barr’s characterization of the obstruction investigation is
more problematic. Barr omitted two very important points from Mueller’s failure
to find indictable actions by President Trump. First, Barr ignored Mueller’s
statement that the report did not make a prosecutorial judgment because the
team “accepted OLC’s legal conclusion” that “’the indictment or criminal
prosecution of a sitting president would impermissibly undermine the capacity of
the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions’ in
violation of ‘the constitutional separation of powers.’”
Second, Barr omitted Mueller’s statement that “Congress may
apply the obstruction laws to the President's corrupt exercise of the powers of
office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the
principle that no person is above the law.” This statement, paired with the statement
that, “if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that
the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,”
contradicts Barr’s determination that no prosecutable obstruction occurred. Given
abuses of power in the examples cited by the report, President Trump’s actions
might rise to the level of impeachable offenses even if Barr is correct that
they were not prosecutable.
While Mueller did not specifically state that Trump’s
actions were impeachable offenses, he seems to have hinted at that possibility.
The reference to corruption refers
to a “subversion of the political process” and an “act done with intent to give
some advantage inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others.” The Constitutional
Rights Foundation points out that the “high crimes and misdemeanors” cited
in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment don’t necessarily require a
finding of illegality. In English law that was familiar to the framers of the
Constitution, the phrase had been applied to remove officials from office on a
variety of charges, some that were criminal and some that were not. “The one
common denominator in all these accusations was that the official had somehow
abused the power of his office and was unfit to serve,” the Foundation notes.
Immediately after the release of Barr’s summary, President
Trump took to Twitter to claim, “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and
Total EXONERATION.” This tweet explicitly contradicts Mueller’s findings on
obstruction. Conservative media outlets picked up the message and trumpeted
what they saw as Trump’s vindication.
What we now know is that after Barr released his summary,
Mueller sent the attorney general a private
letter behind the scenes. In the letter, Mueller stated that the “summary
letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the
afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance
of this Office's work and conclusions.” He wrote that the discrepancy had led
to “public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.”
The obvious conclusion is that the confusion that Mueller referred to was the fact
that Trump and his supporters were claiming exoneration where the Mueller team failed
to find it and specifically pointed out that fact.
Ben Shapiro has said that Mueller was wrong to complain
about Barr’s characterization of the report. In Shapiro’s view, the details
that the report includes serve only to embarrass the president in the absence of
a finding that Trump broke the law. He points out that the details can be found
in the publicly released report and were irrelevant to Barr’s summary. This is
wrong for two reasons. First, a finding that the president acted corruptly
enough that he could not be exonerated deserves a detailed explanation, especially
when the president is claiming “no obstruction” and “total exoneration.”
Second, at the time Mueller wrote his letter on March 27, the report was not
public and there was no way to counter the president’s claims.
Even before this week’s release of the Mueller letter, there
were rumblings that Mueller’s investigators were unhappy with Barr’s synopsis
of their work. On April 3, the New
York Times reported some members of Mueller’s team had said that Barr’s
summary failed to accurately reflect their findings.
In his testimony yesterday, Barr
said that Mueller told him that he was frustrated with the way the media
was portraying the report and that “he was not suggesting that we had
misrepresented his report.” It seems likely that Mueller’s problem was with the
way that Trump-friendly media was covering the report as an exoneration of
Trump rather than the mainstream media parsing the words of Barr’s letter.
The current state of affairs leaves a number of unanswered
questions. First, is whether Barr’s failure to find obstruction legally
accurate. Several conservative legal scholars such as Judge
Andrew Napolitano, Reagan Justice Department official and current
Republican candidate Bill
Weld, law professor Mimi
Rocah and former federal prosecutor Renato
Mariotti dispute Barr’s (and Shapiro’s) interpretation of the obstruction statutes.
Second, there is the question of whether Barr intentionally
tried to gloss over the parts of the Mueller report that were more damaging to President
Trump. A follow-up to this question is whether the instances of Trump’s
obstructive behavior cited in the report would have been redacted if it had not
been likely that Mueller would have gone public with his objections.
Finally, there is the question of Mueller’s side of the
story. Does Mueller agree that Barr’s summary was an accurate representation of
the special counsel’s findings? If so, why did he send a written complaint? Barr
suggested to House members that Mueller’s letter was “a bit snitty, and I think
it was probably written by one of his staff people.” If so, why did Mueller
sign it?
When the big picture is examined, it is apparent that while
Barr’s summary was factually accurate, it did omit important aspects of Mueller’s
report. These omissions changed the characterization of Mueller’s findings that
“the evidence we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents
difficult issues” to Barr’s determination that “the report identifies no
actions… done with corrupt intent.” The only way to resolve these discrepancies
and know exactly what Mueller and his investigators took issue with is to have
Mueller testify.
Originally published on
The
Resurgent
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