On late Tuesday night, April 30, 2019, the Washington Post revealed that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr discussing the four page summary of Mueller’s Report submitted to Congress by Barr. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/mueller-complained-that-barrs-letter-did-not-capture-context-of-trump-probe/2019/04/30/d3c8fdb6-6b7b-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html In this March 27, 2019 letter Mueller stated that Barr’s summary letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions. … There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure the full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.” http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/images/05/01/letter.32719.pdf Barr testified today, May 1, 2019, before the Senate that he offered to let Mueller review his summary letter to Congress before it was sent out and Mueller declined.
On March 28, 2019, Barr called Mueller to discuss this letter and, according to Barr, he asked Mueller “if he was suggesting that the [summary] was inaccurate and he said no, but that the press reporting had been inaccurate, and that the press was reading too much into it. I asked him specifically what his concern was and he said that his concern focused on his explanation as to why he did not reach a conclusion on obstruction. And he wanted more put out on that issue. … But he was very clear with me that he was not suggesting that we had misrepresented his report.” I am going to presume Barr didn’t invent this telephone conversation on the theory that whoever leaked the March 27, 2019 letter would also have called the Washington Post to dispute Barr’s statement regarding the call to Mueller.
News organizations in general, and CNN in particular, immediately rushed to label this minor news report to be “explosive,” a “bombshell,” and all other manner of things incendiary when in fact Mueller was just commenting that maybe he would have worded the four page Barr summary a little differently. (CNN’s Editor at Large Chris Cillizza was perhaps the most melodramatic of the hyperventilating reporters with his ridiculously titled article “William Barr Is In Deep Trouble” https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/william-barr-robert-mueller-mueller-report/index.html). To the extent that Barr’s summary was inaccurate, and I don’t think it was, Barr released the Mueller Report with some minor redactions so it really doesn’t matter how Barr summarized the report.
Of course no one at CNN or the Washington Post questioned the propriety of someone leaking this letter on the eve of Barr’s testimony before the US Senate or that the letter itself looks like it was written for public consumption.
From these insignificant events Democrats are now bellowing that Barr needs to resign. Maybe one day the Democrats will just accept that Hillary Clinton blew an election she should have won and focus on winning the Presidential election in 2020. That day is not today.
