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Former Attorney General William Barr is unleashing heavy criticism of former special counsel Robert Mueller to an unprecedented degree years after his Russia investigation came to an end.
"I don't think he was on top of his game. I think he made some very serious errors," Barr said in an interview with former New York Times editor Bari Weiss on her Honestly podcast published Thursday.
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"He goes out and hires partisan Democrats to make up his investigative team, which means half the country is going to be suspicious from the very beginning," Barr told Weiss, according to the transcript. "That defeated the whole purpose of naming him. I think it was pretty evident within a few months of his taking the position that there had been no collusion."
Well, duh. When they didn't renew the Carter Page FISA in September 2017, it was clear they knew.
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"But instead of stopping it at that point and letting the country move on, he took two instances, which clearly on their face were not obstruction and which even his final report doesn't try to argue were obstruction," and used them to "bootstrap the rest of the two-year investigation," Barr added.
They were trying to bait Trump into actually doing something they could then scream about OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE with all of the leaks to provoke him.
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Critics of Barr have long condemned his rollout of Mueller's report, including his sending a letter to Congress with a summary of its findings that preceded the report's release. But in speaking with Weiss, Barr expressed exasperation at what he said was the Mueller team's failure to heed his request to deliver to him a report that could be released to the public immediately.
"I asked him, when you give me the report, you have to sanitize it so I'm in a position to release it as soon as you give it to me because if there's a delay between the time you give me the report and the time I can make it public under the law ... a lot of damage can be done to the country, the stock market, and our foreign adversaries. People are going to wonder if the president's going to jail. So you have to give it to me in a form in which I can release it," Barr said.
The former attorney general said what he got, a report with no redactions and grand jury materials that needed to be concealed, forced him to come forward with a summary while redactions were implemented for roughly three weeks. This was despite Mueller saying he understood Barr's directive to give him a report that could be released quickly, the former attorney general said.
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"I don't know why it was done. It was inexplicable to me," Barr said. He said in the intervening period he had to tell people "what the bottom line was: that there was going to be no indictment of the president and, therefore, there was no collusion. He didn't reach a decision on obstruction. I took the sentence from his conclusion and said while he didn't find obstruction, he didn't exonerate him. I put that in the letter. And then I said, 'However, I am making the decision based on the report, and I don't find there was obstruction.' And then I explained why I didn't find there was obstruction. So half the letter is me explaining my decision not Mueller's decision. And I thought that was the responsible thing to do. People who are acting in good faith can scour that letter and not see anything misleading in it."
He added: "The other thing I haven't really understood what the thrust of this complaint is because we got the report out a couple of weeks later, and if the stuff was so damaging, why didn't Congress impeach him at that point? There were crickets. So the idea that I affected the thing by summarizing the report ... was the left-wing throwing a tantrum because Mueller didn't deliver the goods as far as they were concerned."
LinkBarr's being disingenuous here. He knows that Pelosi. Nadler and Schiff were counting on using that grand jury information as a basis for impeaching Trump. She rewrote the rules of the House and hired a bunch of lawyers in anticipation of getting their hands on that information from Mueller. But before Mueller finished the report, DC Circuit Court of Appeals restricted access to grand jury material under federal rule 6(e). That decision derailed their plans.
Barr dropped the ball plenty of times after this but he outmaneuvered Team Mueller and saved Trump from an impeachment for anything in the Mueller investigation.
