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WASHINGTON – The special advocate, Robert S. Mueller III, wrote a letter in late March to Attorney General William P. Barr, in which he objected to what he said. Quickly describes the findings of the investigation on Russia. Department of Justice.
The letter adds to the growing evidence of a fracture between them and is another sign of the anger of the special advocate investigators about the way Mr. Barr has qualified. their findings, which allowed Mr. Trump to falsely claim that he had been justified.
The specific objections raised by Mr. Mueller in his letter were not clear. Mr. Barr defended his descriptions of the findings of the investigation in conversations with Mr. Mueller in the days following the mailing of the letter, according to two people having knowledge of their discussions.
Mr. Barr, who was due to testify Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the investigation, said publicly that he did not agree with some of the legal grounds set out in the Mueller report. Senior Democratic legislators have invited Mr. Mueller to testify in the coming weeks, but have not been able to set a date for his testimony.
"The special advocate pointed out that nothing in the March 24th Attorney General's letter was inaccurate or misleading," Justice Ministry spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in response to a request for comment on Tuesday. afternoon. "But he expressed his frustration at the lack of context and the resulting media coverage regarding the obstruction analysis by the special council."
A spokesman for the special council office declined to comment.
One of the main issues raised by the litigation is how the public has understood the Mueller report since the special advocate ended his investigation and submitted his 448-page report on March 22 to the Attorney General, his boss. and a longtime friend. the A four-page letter that Mr. Barr sent to Congress two days later gave little detail to the Special Advocate's findings and gave the impression that Mr. Mueller's team found no wrongdoing, allowing Mr. Trump to declare himself exempt.
But when Mr. Mueller's report was released on April 18, he painted a much more damning picture of Mr. Trump and showed that he believed there was important evidence that Mr. Trump had obstructed justice. .
Over the past month, further friction between the Attorney General and the Special Council has emerged over issues such as the legal theories of constitutional protection afforded to presidents to enable them to do their job and the way in which the Mr. Mueller's team conducted the investigation.
In his testimony before the Congress in April, prior to the release of the report, Barr disagreed when asked if he thought the inquiry was a "witch hunt" – Mr. M's favorite term. Trump. It "depends on where you sit," Barr said.
"If you are someone who is falsely accused of something, you would tend to view the investigation as a witch hunt," he said, apparently referring to the president.
His testimony contrasted with the comments he made at the confirmation hearing held in January. "I do not think Mr. Mueller would be involved in a witch hunt," he said at the time.
A gap between the two men seemed to develop in the months that followed, as the special council completed its investigation.
Mr. Barr and senior Justice officials were frustrated by the way Mr. Mueller ended his investigation and wrote his report, according to the two people who knew of the discussions and another person who was knowledgeable about the issue. .
They expressed their irritation that Mr. Mueller failed in his task by refusing to decide whether Mr. Trump would have broken the law. This left Mr Barr to release Mr Trump without the support of the special advocate.
Senior officials of the Ministry also considered that Mr. Mueller's reason for not deciding before deciding whether Mr. Trump had committed a crime was misleading and contradictory, and concluded that Mr. Mueller's report showed that that there was no lawsuit against him.
But Mr. Mueller has presented evidence against the president. After explaining that he had declined to make a judgment, citing as a factor the Department of Justice's view that the presidents-in-office could not be charged, the special advocate explained more details. A dozen attempts of impediment on the part of the president. He also left the door open for the charges after Trump left.
"If we had confidence, after a thorough investigation into the facts, that the president had clearly not obstructed the justice, we would say," wrote Mr. Mueller and his investigators . "However, on the basis of the facts and the applicable legal standards, we can not pronounce ourselves."
According to Mr. Mueller's report, the Attorney General and other senior law enforcement officials appeared to have been written for the Congress and the public, and not as a report. confidential addressed to Mr. Barr, as required by the regulation that governs the special advocate. .
Some of the Special Council investigators told their staff that they were unhappy with Mr. Barr's initial description of their findings, Government officials and others said, and their findings were more troubling for President Trump than what Mr. Barr had indicated in his four-page letter. This has turned out to be the case.
In one case, Mr. Barr interpreted Mr. Mueller's words out of context to suggest that the Chair had no motive to obstruct justice. In another case, he pulled a fragment of a sentence from the Mueller report that made a conclusion less prejudicial to the president.
The investigators wrote: "Although the investigation established that the Russian government would perceive the benefits of a Trump presidency and was striving to achieve this result, and that the campaign hoped to benefit from information stolen and published by voters through to the efforts of Russia, the investigation did not allow that the members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its activities of electoral interference.
Mr. Barr's letter quoted only the passage that the investigation did not reveal any conspiracy or coordination.
It is unclear whether the members of Mr. Mueller's team were particularly angry or the letter from Mr. Mueller quoted them.
Despite disagreement over the report, members of Mueller's team worked alongside senior Justice Department officials to remove confidential information from the report before it was released.
A few hours before the publication of the Mueller report, Barr said at a press conference that he had "disapproved some of the legal theories of the special council" on what constitutes a hindrance to presidential justice. He also said repeatedly that the special council had found "no collusion" between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. President Trump often uses the term, but Mueller's investigators pointed out that there was no legal standard and left it out of their judgments.
Instead, the investigators wrote that they found no evidence to prove that it was a criminal plot between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
At the press conference, Barr also said that some of Trump's efforts to thwart the investigation should be put in their "context".
"There is ample evidence that the president was frustrated and angered by the sincere belief that the investigation undermined his presidency, under the impetus of his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks," he said. .
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