By Sadie Gurman and Byron Tau
WASHINGTON -- Attorney General William Barr said he would
deliver the special counsel's still-secret report to Congress
within a week and vowed to explain his reasons for blacking out
parts of the roughly 400-page document, a pledge that did little to
mollify demands from Democrats for full access to the report.
"I am relying on my own discretion to make as much of it public
as I can, " Mr. Barr told lawmakers on Tuesday, adding that he will
color-code the redactions and provide notes explaining the reasons
for each.
His comments, a reiteration of his promise to release the edited
report by mid-April, came during a hearing on the Justice
Department's budget that was immediately overtaken by questions
from Democrats about his handling of special counsel Robert
Mueller's findings about Russian interference in the 2016
election.
Democrats have criticized Mr. Barr's approach, saying they want
to see the complete conclusions of the 22-month investigation and
have threatened to issue a subpoena for the report in the coming
days if their demands aren't met. The matter could head to court,
where judges have little precedent or guidance on how to decide
whether Congress is entitled to certain types of secret
information.
Two days after receiving Mr. Mueller's report, Mr. Barr released
a four-page letter in which he summarized what he called the
special counsel's main conclusions.
Mr. Barr wrote that Mr. Mueller's team didn't find that
President Trump and his campaign had conspired or coordinated with
Russia's interference in the 2016 election, but hadn't made a
"traditional prosecutorial decision" on whether Mr. Trump had
obstructed justice during the probe. In the absence of such a
conclusion, Mr. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
determined that Mr. Trump's actions didn't meet the bar of a
crime.
"It is extraordinary to evaluate hundreds of pages of evidence,
legal document, and findings based on a 22-month long inquiry and
make definitive legal conclusions in less than 48 hours," said Rep.
Nita Lowey (D., N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Appropriations
Committee, at Tuesday's hearing. "Even for someone who has done
this job before, I would argue it is more suspicious than
impressive," she said, referring to Mr. Barr's tenure as attorney
general in the George H.W. Bush administration.
Mr. Barr told lawmakers that Mr. Mueller's views were "not a
mystery" to officials at the Justice Department prior to the
submission of the report. Mr. Barr shed no new light on why Mr.
Mueller didn't make a recommendation about obstruction of justice,
or why he made the determination on his own.
Democrats' concerns were heightened after reports last week that
some investigators on Mr. Mueller's team had told associates in
recent days that they believe the report is more critical of Mr.
Trump on the obstruction issue than Mr. Barr indicated in his
summary.
Mr. Barr said he offered Mr. Mueller a chance to review the
summary of his conclusions, but he declined. The special counsel's
office had provided summaries of its findings to Mr. Barr but,
according to the Justice Department, all of them contained
grand-jury material that wouldn't be immediately releasable to the
public.
"I suspect that they probably wanted more put out, but in my
view, I was not interested in putting out summaries," Mr. Barr
said. "Any summary, regardless of who prepares it, not only runs
the risk of being underinclusive or overinclusive, but would
trigger a lot of discussion and analysis that really should await
everything coming out at once."
Mr. Barr noted that many of the regulations Mr. Mueller operated
under were developed after Democratic outrage about the handling of
independent counsel Ken Starr's investigation into allegations that
then-President Clinton committed impeachable offenses by lying
about his affair with a White House intern.
"There was a lot of reaction against the publication of Ken
Starr's report. And many of the people who are right now calling
for the release of this report were basically castigating Ken Starr
and others for releasing the Starr report," he said.
The hearing was Mr. Barr's first public appearance since the
report was delivered and could escalate what is expected to be a
bitter and protracted political fight that is almost certain to
land in the court.
Republicans characterized the standoff as a waste of time and a
distraction.
"We've heard a lot about the Mueller report today. Twenty-two
months of investigation, 2,800 subpoenas, $25 million from
taxpayers, 500 witness interviews, 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents and
who knows how many warrants -- and the conclusions are simple: no
collusion, no obstruction," said Rep. Tom Graves of Georgia.
Mr. Barr said the Justice Department's inspector general will
likely finish by May or June its probe into whether the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and federal prosecutors abused their
authority in obtaining warrants from the nation's secret spy court
to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The issue has
been a longstanding grievance among Republicans since details of
the Russia probe began emerging.
Mr. Barr has said he has been reviewing the Mueller report with
Mr. Rosenstein, their top aides and a member of Mr. Mueller's team,
and blacking out grand-jury material, classified information and
other information to protect the privacy of individuals not charged
with a crime.
He is under intense pressure to produce the edited report
quickly amid concerns from Democrats that the attorney general, a
longtime advocate of executive-branch authority, is seeking to
protect the president from politically damaging information the
report may contain.
Mr. Barr has sought to allay those fears, saying earlier that he
has no plans to share the report with the White House for a review
of any confidential or privileged information. On Tuesday, though,
he declined to say whether the Justice Department had briefed the
White House about the report.
In the House, now led by Democrats, the Judiciary Committee
authorized subpoenas for the report last week, and the chairman of
that panel said he could issue them in the coming days if the
Justice Department doesn't meet the committee's demands.
It is the material Mr. Mueller gathered during grand jury
proceedings -- documents as well as testimony -- that may lead to
the greatest number of redactions in the report. By law, grand jury
material is secret and in general can be released only with the
permission of a judge.
Few courts have grappled with the question of whether Congress
is entitled to such material and under what circumstances, meaning
there is little precedent for how courts would interpret such a
subpoena.
In previous investigations into presidential wrongdoing, special
prosecutors received a judge's permission to use material related
to grand jury matters in reports to either Congress or the public.
The Justice Department hasn't done so in this case, despite the
request from congressional Democrats.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,
which would play a role in deciding whether Congress could gain
access to the Mueller grand jury material if lawmakers went to
court to seek it, said last week in an unrelated case that judges
have no inherent authority to release grand jury evidence to
individuals seeking the information.
An earlier opinion, which the panel of judges didn't dispute in
its April 5 ruling, allowed Congress to obtain such information
only in the context of an impeachment proceeding.
--Aruna Viswanatha contributed to this article.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com and Byron Tau at
byron.tau@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 09, 2019 19:27 ET (23:27 GMT)
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