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The Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, rejected a call to testify Thursday before the Judiciary Committee of the House, starting a fierce battle with Congressional Democrats for dealing with the Mueller report in the midst of appeals to his resignation.
The Justice Department said Barr was withdrawing his participation in a demonstration against the decision of the Democratic Chairman of the committee, Jerrold Nadler, to allow a staff lawyer to question him alongside his members. However, this decision is likely to expose Barr to accusations that he would attempt to avoid accountability for his role in publishing the Mueller report on Russia's interference in the presidential election. 2016.
A four-page summary of the prosecutor's report to Congress on April 24 was criticized for making the Donald Trump report shine.
Wednesday night, Hillary Clinton launched into the fray with an accusing denunciation from the Attorney General. She told MSNBC that her testimony before the Judiciary Committee of the Senate earlier in the day had been "incredibly arrogant" in her "degree of indifference, even contempt of Congress."
The positions Barr took, said Clinton, were different from the ones she'd never heard before. They went "to the heart of whether we are a nation of laws or a nation of strong men".
Clinton, who was Trump 's rival in the 2016 election and the subject of much of the Russian interference that led to the investigation on Mueller, later accused Barr of' s death. act as "the defense counsel of the president – he is not the attorney general of the United States in the way he has conducted himself".
Clinton's intervention came shortly after Barr had been confronted with hours of hard questions from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, during which he was repeatedly accused of lying or misleading. in error the American people. At the end of the day, many Democrats, including presidential candidates Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, had asked for his resignation.
Barr is accused of having drafted the 448-page report to give the impression that Mueller had definitely concluded that there was no collusion or cooperation between Trump, his campaign and the Russian government. In fact, the Mueller report is full of details on the links between Trump's badociates and the Russian government, as well as at least 11 attempts by the president to prevent the special advocate's investigation. – a potentially criminal action on which Mueller has reached no conclusion, stating that he was letting Congress decide.
On Wednesday, the Department of Justice released the full text of a letter in which Mueller complained directly to Barr that his summary of the report partially reflected the investigation. A "public confusion" ensued.
Barr further aggravated the disagreement with the Democrats in the way he spun Mueller's letter. In his account of the events, the Attorney General spoke to the special advocate the day after the receipt of the letter and, during a 15-minute conversation, Mueller badured him he did not think his summary was inaccurate.
This is contrary to the spirit of Mueller's letter, which was deeply critical of Barr's summary, deploring that it "does not fully reflect the context, nature and substance of the work and the conclusions of this office ".
The democratic anger over the Attorney General's conduct was further aggravated by his failure to meet Wednesday's deadline that he should not return the full version of the Mueller report to the Judiciary Committee of the House. . Nadler told reporters that there was no respect for the summons to appear in the next few days, he would start contempt of Congress proceedings against Barr.
On the Republican side, party leaders are struggling to try to stop the investigation of a possible obstruction of justice. At the end of the Senate hearing on Wednesday, Lindsey Graham, Republican Chair of the Judiciary Committee, said, "I will not do anything. Already enough. It's over. "
As part of that ruling, he said he would not call Mueller himself to testify. But with Democrats leading the House and the many Democratic candidates running for next year's presidential election multiplying calls for Barr's resignation, the fight seems to be just beginning.
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