Like clockwork, Attorney General William Barr dropped a follow-up letter regarding the Mueller report just before 5 p.m. on a Friday. More notable than his confirmation that he plans on releasing the report by “mid-April” is the fact that he confirmed that special counsel Robert Mueller is in fact personally assisting in preparing the report for public consumption. This detail effectively takes the wind of out of the sails of anyone hoping that Barr massively misconstrued Mueller’s findings in his primary letter from last week.
Despite left-wing meltdowns that Barr has rigged the release of the Mueller report, he really couldn’t be more transparent about the process. He confirmed that his letter was a summary of the Mueller report’s “principal conclusions,” a point that ought not to be necessary to explicate. He also announced that he’s available to testify in front of both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees at the beginning of May.
Still, Barr’s update has already prompted speculation from the media.
Remarkably, Barr could have issued this EXACT letter along with his initial memo: noting the process by which he was working through matters, the length of Mueller’s report, and clarification that his memo was not a summary.
Instead, he waited days to send this. Curious
— Sam Stein (@samstein) March 29, 2019
Barr is a fossil, coming from an era when people were less gullible for conspiracy theories and less histrionic. So he could have hardly expected the media hysteria over whether his four-page letter summarized the conclusions or the entirety of a +300-page report. To him, it probably seems like a distinction without a difference, not something likely to draw fire from journalists with apparent deep personal investment in the Mueller probe.
All in all, Americans ought to feel reassured that the Mueller report is in fact coming out, and that Mueller himself will ensure it’s as complete as possible.
