Attorney General William Barr criticized Robert Mueller on Wednesday for failing to exercise his “responsibility” as a prosecutor to decide whether President Trump violated the law by obstructing the Russia investigation.
“If he wasn’t going to go down the path of making a traditional prosecutive decision, he shouldn’t have investigated” acts of alleged obstruction, Barr said. But Barr has come under intense fire over his handling of the special counsel report, with top Democrats calling for his resignation or impeachment, after reports surfaced of a letter by Mueller to Barr disagreeing with the attorney general’s public statements about the report. The letter said Barr’s four-page summary, which appeared to clear the president of all wrongdoing “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.
Barr told the panel that the day after receiving Mueller’s letter, he called him and asked him, “what’s the issue here?” He asked Mueller if he thought anything in his four-page summary was “inaccurate,” and Mueller told him it was not “but that the press reporting was inaccurate.” And, he said, “we were frankly surprised” when he found out Mueller had decided not to make a decision about charging the president with obstruction of justice.