Attorney General Bill Barr is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, and Sen. Lindsey Graham kicked things off by pledging to go back an look into events that led to the start of the Mueller investigation.
One area Barr helped clear up had to do with a Washington Post report that Mueller wasn’t happy with the AG’s letter to Congress summarizing the investigation’s findings. Dems and many in the media (pardon the redundancy) immediately helped serve up the false impression that Barr misrepresented the Mueller findings to Congress ahead of the release of the full report. Reading deeper into the story, however, it became clear what Mueller was referring to, as Barr again reminded Dems on the committee today:
Barr on his call with Mueller: he says special counsel was concerned with media reports about his letter. He wanted summaries released to better inform the news coverage. "I asked him if he was suggesting my March 24 letter was inaccurate, and he said no." ..
— Del Quentin Wilber (@DelWilber) May 1, 2019
…"But he said the press reporting was inaccurate. He said the press was reading too much into it. His concern focused on his explanation about why he did not reach a conclusion on obstruction and he wanted to put out more on that issue."
— Del Quentin Wilber (@DelWilber) May 1, 2019
Barr says Mueller told him after sending him a letter raising concerns about the characterizations of the report that he was more upset at media depictions, not that Barr and the department had misrepresented his report pic.twitter.com/jk7wXiqa45
— TicToc by Bloomberg (@tictoc) May 1, 2019
Don’t expect the media to be in any rush to add full context to some of their original breathless reports that Mueller’s criticism was with Barr’s summary instead of the media’s spin.
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