May 7, 2019
During last Wednesday’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee almost every Democrat on the panel outright called the Attorney General William Barr a liar. In addition, many Democrat lawmakers and media pundits are calling for Barr to either resign or be impeached. To what does he owe this vitriol and impugning of his character? Democrats are claiming that a conveniently leaked letter to the Washington Post, timed perfectly to coincide with Barr’s Congressional hearings, written by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to Barr, proves Barr lied.
Further, Democrats are accusing Barr of nefarious motivations because he is refusing to break the law and release the full Mueller Report, along with underlying documents. In spite of releasing almost the entirety of the 448 page Special Counsel Report, with the exception of lawfully required redactions, congressional Democrats are threatening to hold Barr in contempt. Never mind that the full report has been made available to Democrats to view in a secure location, yet not a single Democrat has gone to view the report.
Incredibly Democrats are also threatening to have Barr arrested by the Sergeant at Arms and be physically brought before the House Judiciary Committee. Barr has justifiably refused to testify before the House Committee because of the highly irregular change Democrats made in the format of the questioning.
The reality is that Democrat lawmakers and the media are disconsolate that Mueller’s investigation concluded no criminality. Unwilling to let go of their plans to end Trump’s presidency they are attempting to relitigate the Special Counsel investigation. Fortunately, for the country, and the rule of law, Barr has been an effective bulwark against the Democrats aggressive unethical tactics. Unfortunately, for Barr, this has ignited the ire of the left.
Did Barr Lie to Congress?
According to the WAPO on March 24th Barr received a letter from Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a response to Barr’s four page memo to Congress regarding the Mueller investigation’s findings. In the letter Mueller wrote that Barr’s memo, which Barr has stated was only intended to inform the public on Mueller’s conclusions and was not a summary, “didn’t fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office and conclusions.”
Subsequent to receiving the letter, while testifying before Congress on April 10, Barr was asked if Mueller concurred with his assessment, including his finding that Trump did not commit an obstruction of justice offense. He answered that he did not know if Mueller agreed. Democrats and many in the media are now claiming that this leaked letter proves that Barr lied under oath.
However, contrary to the spin by the left ,The WAPO reporting does not make the claim that Mueller disputed the accuracy of Barr’s letter. Mueller’s grievance was with the media’s portrayal of Barr’s memo, not Barr’s conclusions.
Clearly Barr did not lie. The very reporting which the left is claiming proves Barr lied to Congress actually shows that he did not.
During his testimony Barr confirmed that Mueller never stated that he found Barr’s conclusions “misleading or inaccurate”. Barr added that he found Mueller’s letter “snitty”, and that it was probably written by one of the prosecutors on Mueller’s team. As is well-known, perplexingly Mueller filled his team with Democrat donors, and Hillary Clinton supporters.
The left’s argument that Barr is covering up and lying for the president is belied by the facts. Barr always maintained, even before the Special Counsel report was completed, that he would release as much of the Report as legally allowed; notwithstanding that he was legally required to release nothing. It would be nonsensical for Barr to misrepresent Mueller’s findings in the memo to Congress when he knew that within weeks he would be releasing the report in almost its entirety.
Special Counsel Report
Apparently, in spite of not finding evidence to charge Trump and his associates with criminal conspiracy or obstruction, Mueller, and his team of Democrat prosecutors did not want their report to remove the shadow of wrongdoing that has been hanging over Trump’s presidency.
It’s obvious to anyone who has read the Mueller report that the objective of the 448 page opus was to shape a narrative that Trump and his associates, while not criminally guilty, were also not innocent. Never mind that prosecutors are not supposed to malign those not being charged with a crime or exonerate the accused. A prosecutor’s only mission is to return an indictment or decline to charge.
In effect, Mueller’s team, and those on the left claiming that the Report doesn’t prove Trump’s innocence need to be reminded of how the justice system in America works. Here’s a message for every Never-Trumper: Our system of justice is not “guilty, until proven innocent”; not even for the President of the United States whom you hate and want to remove from office.
Emmet Flood Letter
A letter sent by White House Counsel Emmet Flood to Attorney General Barr in April, written for the purpose of memorializing Flood’s “concerns” related to the Special Counsel’s Report, was recently publicly released. One problem cited by Flood was the reasoning given by the Social Counsel for why they did not come to a conclusion on the obstruction question.
The report stated that they were unable to “conclusively determine that no criminal conduct occurred.” Flood explains that “making conclusive determinations of innocence is never the task of the federal prosecutor.” He added that “prosecutors simply are not in the business of establishing innocence, any more than they are in the business of “exonerating” investigated persons.
Rather, according to Flood, they compiled a “182-page discussion of raw evidentiary material combined with its own inconclusive observations on the arguable legal significance of the gathered content.” He added that none of the purported facts, in the “far more detailed than the text of any known criminal indictment, or declination memorandum”, have been subjected to “adversarial testing or independent analysis.”
Flood, along with many others, have speculated that the Report was written with the intent of providing Congress with a “road map” to enable the Democrats in Congress to take action against the president for obstruction of justice. Apparently that’s also how the media and the Democrats in power have interpreted the Special Counsel Report.
The Democrats’ refusal to stop investigating the president when no findings of collusion, or any criminality has been found after three years of multiple exhaustive investigations, just confirms that they are not acting in good faith. If their agenda was only about learning the truth and not destroying/ending Trump’s presidency, they should have been relieved to learn that it has unambiguously been concluded that neither Trump nor anyone in his campaign worked nefariously with Russian nationals to subvert the outcome of the presidential election.
Unfortunately, it appears that many on the left were actually hoping that Mueller’s investigation would prove that their president was an agent of Russia. It’s clear that the accusation of Russian collusion was only the vehicle to achieve their goal of undoing the 2016 presidential election.
Attorney General Barr
Unlike the neutered former Attorney General Jeff sessions, who recused himself from all matters related to Russia, AG Barr has indicated that he is willing to uncover any wrongdoing committed by the top echelons of our intelligence agencies. Barr has confirmed that he has a team within the Justice Department investigating: the origins of the Trump-Russia probe; the predicate for why Obama’s FBI spied on the Trump campaign; and the many leaks that emanated from the Russia probes.
During his Senate testimony Barr also expressed that he believed that it was possible that the Steele dossier, the now debunked compilation of Russian lies produced by Fusion GPS, and commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign, was Russian disinformation. Even the liberal New York Times has reported this as a possibility. Barr stated that the dossier would also be a part of the DOJ probe into the origins of the Russian collusion narrative.
Clearly Barr’s resolve to uncover the abuses of power at the highest level of our government, along with the end-result of the Special Counsel investigation, has put him in the crosshairs of the liberal establishment and their Democrat friends in the mainstream media. Fortunately, Barr is undeterred. Those responsible for the weaponization of our intelligence agencies need to be held to account. This should never happen again.
In the words of Emmet Flood, “This is not a Democrat or a Republican issue; it is a matter of having a government responsible to the people-and, again, not the other way around. In the partisan commotion surrounding the released Report, it would be well to remember that what can be done to a President can be done to any of us.”
