Republican investigators are concerned special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report could be tainted by misleading facts.
Some top GOP lawmakers have accused the special counsel’s team of providing evidence without necessary context, allowing Democrats and other critics of the president to spin the narrative in their favor. Some Democrats have argued it will prove there was “collusion” between Trump’s campaign and Russia, no matter if there’s no evidence of a criminal conspiracy.
Attorney General William Barr released a summary last month that said Mueller’s team was unable to establish the Trump campaign was involved in criminal conspiracy with Russia. A redacted version of the full, roughly 400-page report is due out Thursday.
Last month, before Mueller submitted his final report to the Justice Department, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned Barr in a letter that Mueller’s “selective” use of emails in the special counsel’s court filings, particularly those of former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos.
In charges against the campaign adviser, prosecutors included a footnote that said emails obtained by their team showed a “Campaign official suggested ‘low level’ staff should go to Russia.” The senators, who both sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Mueller’s team neglected to share the context that those emails were voluntarily provided to the special counsel and they “actually show that the Trump Campaign wanted someone ‘low level’ to decline these types of invitations.”
In another allegation of cherry-picking, the senators said prosecutors did not disclose that Papadopoulos had conversations with representatives of several governments, not just Russia, and his supervisor Sam Clovis had opposed a potential trip to Russia.
“The indictments that were made by the Mueller team, I think some are very questionable, and I think there’s pieces of them that always read like Russian spy novels,” Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said earlier this month.
“That was done on purpose to create a narrative to make the American people think, as they were indicting these people, that somehow this had to do with collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,” Nunes said.
As part of special counsel Mueller’s Russia investigation, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI related to meetings and conversations with Russian officials in 2016 and in December spent nearly two weeks in prison.
Republicans have also pointed to the charges brought against former longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Prosecutors said Cohen tried to email Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office twice in 2016, but did not give the context that he had sent emails to a general press inbox, sources told RealClearInvestigations.
In a rare display of bipartisanship, Nunes and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., sent a letter to Barr last month asking for Mueller to provide them a classified briefing on all the findings in his investigation.
