Attorney General William Barr said during his Wednesday congressional testimony that he is "reviewing" the question of whether the infamous Steele dossier was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Before the redacted version of Mueller's report was released, Barr sent a letter to Congress summarizing the "principal conclusions" of Mueller's report and told lawmakers he did not believe President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice.
The customary histrionics followed. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., said Nadler took away the committee's right to hear from Barr.
The special counsel did, however, lay out 10 "episodes" that could potentially be obstruction, but he left the final decision up to the attorney general. The usual suspects called for impeachment. This threatens to undermine a central objective for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: "to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigation".
"They then discussed whether additional context from the report would be helpful and could be quickly released".
The hearing lasted only a few minutes. Rep. He certainly wouldn't know that no criminality was uncovered. As is described in Mueller's report, during a 2016 campaign rally Trump encouraged Russians "to find the 30,000 emails that are missing" from Clinton. And that is Barr's other sin: refusing to play Mueller's game.
"E$3 ven before I had seen the Mueller report, I questioned whether [Barr's four-page letter] was an accurate representation [of the special counsel's findings]; of course, what he said in his letter was very much at variance with the Mueller report once we all got a chance to read it", King said. We gave Mueller two years to do his job.
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The songwriter and producer lightened the mood at the end of the conversation, joking to Kim that she'll have to help him get out of his bad deals.
"The attorney general of the United States is sworn to uphold the Constitution as our nation's chief law enforcement officer", Nadler said.
A key sticking point, as reported by Fox News, was that Nadler wants to have House Judiciary Committee staff - rather than members of Congress - question Barr on his handling of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report.
For Democrats and their allies, an investigation "not clearing" someone makes that someone as good as guilty if he happens to be a Republican. Sen.
In that hearing he claimed not to know whether Mr Mueller supported his controversial memo summarising the Mueller report and that he did not know why members of Mr Mueller's team would be frustrated over the summary. But Democrats said the delay allowed Trump to use Barr's letter to bake in a public narrative about the report's findings before it was released.
That same pattern emerges again and again in the Mueller report's damning second volume.
The standoff with the Justice Department is one of several fights House Democrats are waging with the Trump administration. "He's the people lawyer", Biden said of Barr.
"He misled the American people with his inaccurate summary of Mueller's report". Conservatives have accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation of improperly investigating whether Trump's campaign had inappropriate contacts with Russian Federation. Either way, in a healthy media environment, such a story would launch a massive investigatory effort. Democrats were focused on how Barr characterized the report, despite having actual copies of the report in hand.
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