{"id":1309945,"date":"2019-05-05T21:48:01","date_gmt":"2019-05-06T03:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/thiessen-column-the-barr-hearing-was-much-ado-about-nothing\/"},"modified":"2019-05-05T21:48:01","modified_gmt":"2019-05-06T03:48:01","slug":"thiessen-column-the-barr-hearing-was-much-ado-about-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/thiessen-column-the-barr-hearing-was-much-ado-about-nothing\/","title":{"rendered":"Thiessen column: The Barr hearing was much ado about nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"
Marc A. Thiessen<\/strong>
AAA<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 If Shakespeare had titled Attorney General William Barr\u2019s appearance on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he would have called it \u201cMuch Ado About Nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Democrats seized on the supposed \u201cbombshell\u201d that special counsel Robert Mueller wrote a letter to Barr expressing dissatisfaction with the attorney general\u2019s four-page memo to Congress from March 24, declaring it \u201cdid not fully capture the context, nature, and substance\u201d of his report. Barr told senators upon receiving the special counsel\u2019s letter that he immediately called Mueller and said, \u201cBob, what\u2019s with the letter? Why don\u2019t you just pick up the phone and call me if there\u2019s an issue?\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a better question he should have asked: \u201cBob, why didn\u2019t you accept my offer to review the memo before it was released to the public?\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact is, Barr gave Mueller the chance to go over the document, and offer comments or suggested edits, before the attorney general made it public. Mueller declined to do so. Sorry, you don\u2019t get to turn down an opportunity to review a document before release, and then complain about it later if you don\u2019t like how it is being covered by the media.<\/p>\n

And putting his complaints in a letter \u2014 \u201cgoing to paper\u201d in Justice Department parlance \u2014 the details of which (surprise, surprise) were then leaked to the media on the eve of Barr\u2019s testimony, was dishonorable. The entire episode hurts Mueller\u2019s reputation more than it does Barr\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Moreover, officials told The Washington Post, \u201cWhen Barr pressed [Mueller] whether he thought Barr\u2019s letter was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not, but felt that the media coverage of the letter was misinterpreting the investigation.\u201d So there was nothing wrong with Barr\u2019s letter per se. What Mueller really wanted was for Barr to release more information \u2014 specifically the introduction and executive summaries of each volume of the report, which he had \u201cmarked with redactions to remove any information that potentially could be protected by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure that concerned declination decisions; or that related to a charged case.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, as Barr testified on Wednesday, even if he had agreed that releasing the introductions and executive summaries was a good idea (which he did not), he could not have done so because they required additional redactions from the intelligence community. Barr did not want to release the report piecemeal. \u201cI thought what we should do is focus on getting the full report out as quickly as possible,\u201d he said. The attorney general did just that.<\/p>\n

Regardless, the whole issue was moot by the time Barr testified, because the entire 448-page report \u2014 including the introduction and executive summaries \u2014 has been released to the public. That did not stop Democrats from using it to attack Barr\u2019s credibility. Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, told Barr \u201cyou lied to Congress\u201d and had \u201cchosen to be the president\u2019s lawyer\u201d rather than America\u2019s lawyer. She announced that she had asked the Justice Department inspector general to investigate his conduct. She called on Barr to resign. \u201cBeing attorney general of the United States is a sacred trust. You have betrayed that trust. America deserves better.\u201d It was a disgusting partisan display. Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., rightly chastised Hirono, declaring, \u201cYou slandered this man from top to bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Far from lying, Barr has bent over backward to be open with Congress and the American people. He overrode Justice Department regulations, and released the full Mueller report with only minor redactions. That\u2019s virtually unprecedented. And he has made an almost completely unredacted version of the report available to members of Congress, who now have access to all but one-tenth of 1 percent of the document. And while the Justice Department worked overtime to speed the redaction process, he released a memo which accurately informed the American people about Mueller\u2019s bottom line conclusions. It is a fact that Mueller declared that his \u201cinvestigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it is a fact that while the report \u201cdoes not exonerate him\u201d of obstruction it also \u201cdoes not conclude that the President committed a crime.\u201d For two years, Trump was falsely accused of being a Russian agent and colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin \u2014 including by many of those on Capitol Hill now attacking Barr\u2019s credibility. If members of Congress want examples of dishonesty and efforts to mislead the American people, they can start by looking in the mirror.<\/p>\n

Follow Marc A. Thiessen on Twitter, @marcthiessen. (c) 2019, The Washington Post Writers Group<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marc A. ThiessenAAA WASHINGTON \u2014 If Shakespeare had titled Attorney General William Barr\u2019s appearance on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he would have called it \u201cMuch Ado About Nothing.\u201d Democrats seized on the supposed \u201cbombshell\u201d that special counsel Robert Mueller wrote a letter to Barr expressing dissatisfaction with the attorney general\u2019s four-page memo to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1309945","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-16 21:10:11","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1309945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1309945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1309945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1309945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}