The White House legal counsel on Thursday accused special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of playing politics with the rollout of the findings of the Russia investigation.
President Trump’s legal team also blasted Mueller for not making a determination on the issue of obstruction of justice.
In a letter to Attorney General William Barr obtained by CNN, White House legal counsel Emmet Flood ripped Mueller’s report for creating “a prosecutorial curiosity — part ‘truth commission’ report and part law school exam paper.”
In his report, a redacted version of which was released earlier this month, Mueller said he found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents seeking to influence the result. He did not, however, make a determination of whether Trump obstructed his probe.
That decision was left to the discretion of Barr, who, with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, determined no obstruction occurred.
But congressional Democrats have seized on 10 detailed episodes laid out by Mueller in his report during which Trump made veiled threats, complained about press coverage of the investigation, and talked about either ending the investigation or pressuring aides to make his biggest political problem go away.
“Far more detailed than the text of any known criminal indictment or declination memorandum, the report is laden with factual information that has never been subjected to adversarial testing or independent analysis,” Flood wrote in his letter to Barr.
Barr faced an intense grilling on Capitol Hill Wednesday, where lawmakers publicly accused him of being biased in his handling of Mueller’s report and of protecting Trump instead of providing transparency to the American public.
The debate over the readout of the Mueller report comes amid a wave of subpoenas issued by congressional Democrats concerning data related to Trump’s 2016 campaign and personal finances.
Trump’s White House has said it does not intend to comply with any of the congressional investigations.
“These are, like, not impartial people,” Trump said last week.
The standoff between the Justice Department and Congress reached a head Thursday morning when Barr elected not to show up to a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Mueller’s report.
Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said he is considering holding Barr in contempt as a result of his unwillingness to testify.
In the meantime, the White House says this week’s political circus over the Mueller report could have been prevented by the man who commissioned it.
“Under a constitution of separated powers,” Flood wrote. “(Justice Department officials) should not be in the business of creating ‘road maps’ for the purpose of transmitting them to committees.”
