Feeding the beast.
True — but the Attorney General wasn’t exactly forthcoming, either. CNN dropped a fact check on a claim from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that William Barr committed a crime in his exchanges with Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Rep. Charlie Crist (D-FL) shortly after the release of his non-summary summary of Robert Mueller’s special counsel report. At those times, Barr said that he didn’t know whether Mueller agreed with his interpretation on obstruction and had not known of any misgivings Mueller had with Barr’s conclusions.
Pelosi claims that the letter from Mueller to Barr demonstrates that he lied to Congress and committed a “crime”:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “The attorney general of the United States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States. That’s a crime” https://t.co/5EtXhKFXTppic.twitter.com/VH5jySLQyN
CNN (@CNN) May 2,2019
Pelosi had been working on this talking point since yesterday’s hearing. Politico reported this morning that she prepped the House Democratic caucus on the argument in their closed-door meeting:
During a closed-door meeting on Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused Attorney General William Barr of committing a crime by lying to Congress.
“We saw [Barr] commit a crime when he answered your question,” Pelosi told Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) during a private meeting Thursday morning, according to two sources present for the gathering.
Pelosi’s comment was an apparent reference to Barr’s response to Crist last month during an appropriations hearing, in which the attorney general said he was not aware of any concerns that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team might have expressed about his four-page summary of Mueller’s findings.
