Thursday, the Justice Department will finally drop a version of the final report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation for Congress and the public. As concerned interests prepare for possible wide-ranging redactions and a debate over the information that is available, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has flatly publicly condemned Attorney General William Barr for his handling of the situation, indicating that she does not trust him and is not prepared to accept his conclusions.
She asserted:
‘AG Barr has thrown out his credibility & the DOJ’s independence with his single-minded effort to protect Donald Trump above all else. The American people deserve the truth, not a sanitized version of the Mueller Report approved by the Trump Admin.’
AG Barr has thrown out his credibility & the DOJ’s independence with his single-minded effort to protect @realDonaldTrump above all else. The American people deserve the truth, not a sanitized version of the Mueller Report approved by the Trump Admin. https://t.co/fgXwiLuQfr
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) April 17, 2019
She issued her condemnation in response to a brand new report in The New York Times that Barr’s team consulted with the Trump administration about Mueller’s findings before they let anyone else see them. Those consultations allowed the development of a counter-report that presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani has indicated is coming soon.
He himself had previously indicated Trump team plans to seek the Mueller report before even the public saw it, but there had been uncertainty in the time since about what steps would actually be taken on that front. At one point, Barr had said Trump waived his right to have any portions of the document redacted on the basis of executive privilege, but apparently he still went out of his way to keep the Trump team in the loop anyway.
It’s not the first time that Trump-allied investigators have acted in such a manner when the hope would be they’d act impartially. Then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) attracted intense scrutiny for meeting at the White House about supposed evidence in the Russia investigation when he was supposed to be leading an impartial investigation that covered them.
Pelosi, meanwhile, has already made her opposition to Barr clear. She called an initial four-page summary he issued of the report “arrogant and condescending,” and she tore into him again after he sat before Congress and offered support for Trump’s false claim he was “spied” on.
At the time, she asserted:
‘He is not the attorney general of Donald Trump. He is the attorney general of the United States. I don’t trust Barr, I trust Mueller.’
Barr, for his part, “didn’t present evidence to support the assertion” that “spying did occur” and “later in his testimony appeared to backtrack, saying he wasn’t certain that any wrongdoing occurred,” the Associated Press shares. In other words, he just threw out the “spying” claim as a bone for Trump.
Although the looming variable in at least some of these lines of concern — in other words, the Mueller report — will soon drop, the fight is far from over. To begin with, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) has a subpoena for the full, unredacted Mueller report ready to go. From there, there’s possible looming testimony before Nadler’s committee from Barr. He’s expected to deliver a press conference before his redacted version of the Mueller report drops.
Check out Twitter’s response to Pelosi…
Featured Image via screenshot
