As usual, the media is making too much of too little in its breathless coverage of a March 27 letter that special counsel Robert Mueller wrote to Attorney General William Barr.
Mueller’s letter complained that Barr’s original four-page summary of Mueller’s full report “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.” Mueller’s complaint does seem to have merit, in that Barr’s summary overstated the importance of Mueller’s decision to not allege that the president had committed illegal obstruction of justice.
In fact, Mueller’s report specifically said just the opposite: that “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him [Italics added].” Even so, Barr specifically included that quotation from Mueller in his summary of the report. Mueller knew that.
This may be why Mueller’s follow-up letter of complaint did not allege that Barr lied and did not even allege that he had deliberately misled anyone. Instead, the letter was asking that Barr quickly release Mueller’s own full summary (before releasing the whole report) because Mueller believed Barr’s summary missed nuances and context.
If the media is going to make a big deal of Barr missing context, the media itself should not misrepresent the context of Mueller’s sentence. Mueller’s goal was to see his own summary released quickly, even as the full report was undergoing the proper review for necessary redactions. That was the extent of Mueller’s request and complaint. He did not make a stronger or more serious complaint about Barr’s work and did not use words like “vehemently object” or “strenuously disagree.”
Reading between the lines, the main nuance at issue seems to be Barr’s lack of strong emphasis on the exact reason Mueller did “not conclude that the president committed a crime.” Mueller specifically had explained that because of Justice Department guidance that a sitting president cannot be indicted, his whole team decided from the very start that he would not make a typical prosecutorial decision on whether to charge.
Barr did explain as much, specifically, in his summary, but he just didn’t emphasize it. As a result, the Trump team and its own right-wing media lackeys have gone way too far in saying that Mueller’s overall report on Russian villainy “exonerates” the president on the obstruction of justice charge. The truth is that Mueller laid out copious evidence that Trump deliberately considered, and sometimes attempted, various ways to impede the investigation. Legal experts disagree as to whether those attempted impediments reached the level of criminal obstruction, or of “impeachable offenses.”
All of this nuance-reading, however, is a matter more of tone than of substance. It’s really not that big a deal, but it’s everything to the crowd that can’t get over the finding of no collusion.
At this point, it’s all moot, because Barr, to his credit, did release the entire report (albeit with rather minimal and justifiable redactions). The whole thing is there for the public to see and to decide for itself.
The report is also there for Congress to see. Impeachment is a political-system remedy, not a court remedy, for abuse of the public trust. If the public, in reading the report, believes Trump clearly deserves impeachment, then the public can communicate that belief to its elected representatives. The nuanced differences of Mueller and Barr ultimately matter very little in those public judgments.
