Bill Barr, painfully eager to do the White House’s bidding, already had a credibility problem. Robert Mueller has made it worse.
Last month, for reasons that have never been fully explained, Attorney General William Barr hosted a press conference. The point, by all appearances, was for Barr to give a pre-spin on then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report shortly before its release. The Republican A. G. argued at the time:
And while I don’t doubt that the White House was pleased with Barr’s characterization of the Mueller report, consider Mueller’s own words this morning:
I don’t mean to sound picky, but there’s a world of difference between “no evidence” and “insufficient evidence to charge.”
If this were the only evidence of Mueller contradicting Bill Barr, it’d hardly be worth mentioning, but it’s actually the start of a long list.
In the attorney general’s initial non-summary summary to congressional leaders, for example, Barr wrote, “The Special Counsel considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment.
