Barr Sounds More and More Like Trump’s Roy Cohn
Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before Congress on Wednesday highlighted the inherent contradiction in his letter about Robert Mueller’s investigation. The problem is not that Mueller did not make a charging decision about obstruction. The real problem is that Mueller did make a charging decision about conspiracy.
Barr was asked questions about Mueller’s investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russia relating to interference with the 2016 election. Barr seemed to move interchangeably between the view that, on the one hand, a president cannot be indicted while in office, and, on the other hand, that the Russia investigation should be analyzed like any other criminal case. But these are two different things. You can’t have it both ways. If a sitting president cannot be indicted, then Congress gets to decide whether to charge a crime through impeachment, not a prosecutor through the normal analysis of criminal statutes.
Barr’s March 25 letter to Congress stated that Mueller concluded that his investigation did not establish conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the election, but that Mueller refrained from making a “traditional prosecutorial judgement” when it came to obstruction. (Again, a president can’t be indicted.) Barr wrote Mueller’s decision “leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.” Congress and the public still do not have access to Mueller’s report, and it has been unclear why Mueller’s declination to make a decision meant that the decision was to be made by Barr.
Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here