The Daily - The Senate Testimony of William Barr

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William Barr defended his handling of the Mueller report, saying he did not misrepresent its findings. We spoke with our colleague who spent the day in the hearing room. Guest: Nicholas Fandos, who covers Congress for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: At a contentious hearing marked by a deep partisan divide, the center of the clash was nothing less than the presidency and the integrity of the law enforcement system.Here are the highlights of Mr. Barr’s testimony on Wednesday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William Barr defended his handling of the Mueller report, saying he did not misrepresent its findings. My colleague, Nick Fandos, spent the day in the hearing room. It's Thursday, May 2nd. So the story starts a couple of weeks ago when Bill Barr, after much anticipation, releases

the 448-page Mueller report. anticipation releases the 448-page Mueller report. At 11 this morning, I'm going to transmit copies of the public version to the chairman and ranking members of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees. Congress is out on recess, scattered all over the country, and scrambles to figure out what to do next. But there's one clear expectation, which is whatever happens now, the Justice Department has spoken, and it's up to Congress to decide

whether or not President Trump will face any sort of consequences for the behavior that was outlined in great detail by Bob Mueller. That is why I have formally requested that Special Counsel Mueller testify before the House Judiciary Committee as soon as possible. So immediately we see Democrats who control the House talk about a number of witnesses that they want to call.

They issue a subpoena the next day for the full Mueller report and all the evidence underlying it. They want the entire unedited report, not the redacted version sent to them by Attorney General William Barr. Because they want to start recreating and scrutinizing the evidence themselves. And they very quickly start to call a number of witnesses. There was no collusion with Russia.

Over at the White House, it's a whole other story. It was a complete and total exoneration. And they basically say, this is the end of the investigation. So that makes it a complete and total exoneration. I don't know any other way to look at it. We're not going to let you talk to these witnesses. We're not going to voluntarily produce this evidence that you won.

Don McGahn, don't adhere to the subpoena, they say. I say it's enough. President Trump vows to block all subpoenas, not just for this investigation, but anything that House Democrats are trying to scrutinize of his administration. They're basically, you know, trying to put a full stop to this story. Get back to infrastructure. Get back to cutting taxes. Get back to lowering drug prices. That's what really that's what we should be doing. That's what really that's what we should be doing.

So now all of a sudden Democrats are finding themselves wrestling not just with the obstruction that Bob Mueller detailed in his 448 page report. They're starting to look around them and say, hey, the president is obstructing us. He's obstructing Congress, another branch of government, just as he did the Department of Justice. And that's serious. And in the middle of that, the one thing that they've got on the books, the one thing they can count on is that we would have Bill Barr facing 11 Democrats, 13 Republicans in the Senate, Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. The Washington Post is breaking a major story. As we speak, Special Counsel Robert Mueller told Attorney General William Barr that the depiction of his findings failed to capture context, nature, and substance of his probe.

And then, on Tuesday night, just hours before senators are ready to convene for this hearing, the New York Times and the Washington Post report the existence of a letter. Expressed his concerns in a letter to William Barr after the Attorney General publicized Mueller's principal conclusions. Wow. This was the four-page letter that Bill Barr put out at the very beginning,

stating that the special counsel had not found evidence of a criminal conspiracy or obstruction of justice. And what Bob Mueller was writing to say is your four pages did not adequately represent what our investigation found and that there appeared to be significant public confusion based on that four-page letter that you put out. And he makes an ask a bar that he put out executive summaries and introductions that were written by the special counsel's team and had been reviewed for redactions already and released those to the public so they can see more evidence right away. And why is this so significant, especially given the timing of

when this letter becomes public? So the letter just hours before senators are going to have to ask questions essentially confirmed something that Democrats have been fearful of and suspicious of for weeks now, which was there was a gulf between Bob Mueller and Bill Barr, and that Bill Barr kind of stepped into the void, spoke for the Mueller investigation, and didn't do so fairly. So this is kind of a stunning thing for Robert Mueller, who we think of as this kind of mute legal figure to do. We have heard nothing publicly from Bob Mueller.

He has not spoken a word. He hasn't testified. He didn't give a press conference. And so for him to write a letter, to memorialize in writing to his boss, to Bill Barr, his dissatisfaction with his process, his concerns about it, underscores the significance of his concern

and the stakes surrounding who's speaking for the investigation. Okay, so Nick, tell me about this hearing with Bill Barr once it actually gets started. So Bill Barr stands, the cameras click, he puts up his right hand. You solemnly swear the testimony you about to give this committee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, except you got it.

Yes. And then he sits down. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and ranking member Feinstein, members of the committee. In the same seat that just a few months ago, he pledged to senators that he would let the Mueller investigation finish and that he would make its conclusions as public as he possibly could. As you see, Bob Mueller was allowed to complete his work as he saw fit. And he said, look, I have done what I said I was going to do. I told this committee that I intended to exercise whatever discretion I had to make as much of the report available.

And then he begins to shade into a kind of preemptive defense of himself. I received a letter from Bob, the letter that's just been put into the record. He says essentially, I was surprised to receive this. I got it out of the blue. I thought I was acting, and I think I did act in a transparent, timely way. I was not interested in putting out summaries, and I wasn't going to put out the report piecemeal. I wanted to get the whole report out. So basically, Barr is saying to these senators, I know you're about to ask me about this letter that Robert Mueller wrote to me,

and I'm here to tell you that I had very good reasons to make the decisions I did. And Bob Mueller might be a great guy, but on this point, he's wrong. That's right. So I'll end my statement there, Mr. Chairman, and glad to take any questions. Thank you very much. And then it's the senators turn. So what do they say? So they make clear very quickly that there are going to be two competing stories. So what have we learned from this report?

On the one side are the Republicans. After all this time and all this money, Mr. Mueller and his team concluded there was no collusion. Who say there was no collusion. As to obstruction of justice, Mr. Mueller left it to Mr. Barr to decide after two years and all this time. He said, Mr. Barr, you decide. Mr. Barr did. There was no obstruction.

I appreciate very much what Mr. Mueller did for the country. I have read most of the report. This investigation. It is over. Is over....is over. Senator Feinstein. The Democrats have a very different story. Contrary to the declarations of the total and complete exoneration,

the special counsel's report contained substantial evidence of misconduct. They believe that Mr. Barr has been acting as a partisan actor and they were out to prove it. You concluded, and I quote, that the evidence is not sufficient to establish by the president to mislead the American people. And they try and build a case that this investigation cannot end. Congress has both the constitutional duty and the authority to investigate the serious findings contained in the Mueller report. to investigate the serious findings contained in the Mueller report. That the rule of law is at stake, that big ideas like the separation of powers and the accountability of the presidency hang in the balance, and that to stop an investigation now would be an abdication of Congress's authority.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, so how exactly are these two sides on this committee making their cases here? Let's start with the Republicans. So Republican senator after Republican senator seemed to zoom, in most cases, first directly towards the fact that, as Barr made very clear and as he decided in the case of obstruction, the president did not break a law. Very quickly, give us your reasoning why you think it would be inappropriate to proceed forward on obstruction of justice in this case. Well, generally speaking, an obstruction case typically has two aspects to it.

One, there's usually an underlying criminality. Let's stop right there. Yeah., there's usually an underlying criminality. Let's stop right there. Was there an underlying crime here? No. Many of them at the same time ask Mr. Barr about questions that have been a hobby horse of the president and of certain Republicans for quite a while now, which is, what about these allegations that there was spying on the campaign? Have you already tasked any staff to look into whether spying by the FBI and other agencies on the Trump campaign was properly predicated? And can Congress expect

a formal report on your findings? Yes, I do have people in the department helping me review the, uh, activities over the summer of 2016. What about these incredibly biased text messages that two of the lead FBI officials working on this were exchanging with each other? This is a text message from Peter Strzok, a top counterintelligence investigator who we now know helped launch this counter-spy investigation of the president of the United States. Peter Strzok says, just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could smell the Trump support. Smell is capitalized. How are we supposed to believe that this was a fair investigation, especially when, at the end of the day, it didn't prove any wrongdoing? There were two investigations here. One was an investigation of Donald Trump.

There was another investigation of Hillary Clinton. And then they returned to another familiar Republican target. They say President Trump may have been treated with political bias, but so was the case of Hillary Clinton. She was gone easy on by many of these same FBI officials. These are the people that made a decision that Clinton didn't do anything wrong and a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign was warranted. We're going to, in a bipartisan way, I hope, deal with Russia. But when the Mueller report is put to bed, and it soon will be, this committee is going to look long and hard at how this all started.

This committee is going to look long and hard at how this all started. So this is the Republicans making the case for basically investigating the investigators, the FBI, the apparatus that brought the Russia investigation as far as it did. Because in their minds, since there are no charges, this was a kind of a smear campaign. And the focus of any investigative apparatus now should be understanding how it got this far. That's right. And we've seen the president and some of his most conservative allies for more than a year now make this argument. I think, was the full Republican Party embracing that idea, that the moment has finally come where what Trump has been clamoring for is actually going to come to pass. Have you looked into the decision by the FBI into why they launched a counterintelligence

investigation? I am looking into it, and I have looked into it. And will you commit to telling us what you find as the result of your own review and investigation? Well, at the end of the day, when I form conclusions, I intend to share it. I'll take that as a yes. Let me ask you. Okay, so that's the Republicans. What about the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee? How are they making their case here? First and foremost, they start by interrogating Bill Barr about this new letter between he and Bob Mueller. Mr. Mueller wrote that your letter threatened to undermine a central purpose for which the department appointed the special counsel, to assure full public confidence

in the outcome of the investigation. They're interested in why Bill Barr told another congressional committee a couple of weeks ago that he didn't know why Mueller or his investigators may be dissatisfied with the way he had talked about the report. I'm somewhat troubled by your testimony here and in the other body. You appeared before the House of Appropriations on April 9th. before the House of Appropriations on April 9th. He was asked in a House hearing after there were press reports of dissatisfaction on the Mueller team, you know, what's up with that? Do you know what's behind this? And the congressman, I believe it was Congressman Crist, asked if you knew what those members of the special counsel's team

were concerned about. You testified in response, no, I don't. And he basically gave a little bit of a squishy answer, but the effect of it was no. And so senators wanted to know. Why did you testify on April 9th that you didn't know the concerns being expressed by Mueller's team when in fact you had heard those concerns directly from Mr. Mueller two weeks before? You had this letter in your hand at this point. What were you talking about?

You knew what Mueller's problem was. He had the Mueller letter that explicitly said, I'm not happy with how you summarize things, at the moment that he went before this other committee and said, I don't quite know what you're talking about. That's right. And not only that, he testified that, in fact, as soon as he got the letter, picked up the phone and called Mueller and said,

Bob, what's with the letter? You know, why don't you just pick up the phone and call me if there's an issue? And consistently, Barr seemed to downplay to Democrats what the significance of this lapse of time and understanding was. I talked directly to Bob, and Bob told me that he did not have objections to the accuracy. Bob told me that he did not have objections to the accuracy. He essentially said, you know, this is a silly dispute. If I end up putting out the full report as I did, what difference does it make? The public can now go and view it. They can now make their own judgments. After a months-long trial, if I wanted to go out and get out to the public what the verdict was,

pending preparation of the full transcript, and I'm out there saying, here's the verdict was pending preparation of the full transcript. And I'm out there saying, here's the verdict. And the prosecutor comes up and taps me on the shoulder and says, well, the verdict doesn't really fully capture all my work. How about that great cross-examination I did? Or how about that third day of trial where I did that? This doesn't capture everything. My answer to that is I'm not trying to capture everything.

I'm just trying to state the verdict. I was struck by the fact that Barr took his opportunity to basically say, remember. And it was my decision how and when to make it public, not Bob Mueller's. I'm the boss here. When it comes to what gets disclosed, that's my decision, not Robert Mueller's. That's right. This is where Barr fell back, both on his authority as Attorney General and the specific regulation governing the special counsel. And he said, basically,

I have control of the baby after Mueller handed it over to me. And I'm sorry if Bob was dissatisfied, essentially. He's my employee. Yeah, I'm Bob's boss. The special counsel's report describes how the president directed White House counsel Don McGahn to fire special counsel Mueller and later told McGahn to write a letter, quote, for our records, end quote, stating that the top Democrat on the committee, basically starts walking through the evidence around the president's interactions with Don McGahn, his White House counsel, who was an important witness for the Mueller investigation.

The report also recounts how the president made repeated efforts to get McGahn to change his story. And is pressing the attorney general to say, look at this behavior. Does existing law prohibit efforts to get a witness to lie, to say something the witness believes is false? Yes. Lie to the government, yes. Look at the president telling McGahn to get rid of the special counsel because he has conflicts. How is that not obstruction of justice? How does that not meet your criteria? You still have a situation where a president essentially tries to change the lawyer's account in order to prevent further criticism of himself.

Well, that's not a crime. Criticism of himself. Well, that's not a crime. So you can, in this situation, instruct someone to lie? No, it has to be, well, to be obstruction of justice, the lie has to be tied to impairing the evidence in a particular proceeding. And they begin to work through what are basically 10 instances that the Mueller report lays out and kind of incredulously listen as Barr comes back with very legally precise and sometimes quite in the weeds kind of answers that I think for Democrats ring hollow, but allow Barr to keep maneuvering forward through

these questions. So, Nick, what are we learning about Bill Barr through these exchanges and through this testimony? So what we see is an attorney general who is supremely confident in his understanding of the law, in his own judgments, and has a generous view of the president's executive power. These are things that we knew were true about Bill Barr. And to a remarkable degree, he is acting them out just as Republicans and Democrats seem to agree that he would. I mean, he was not an upbeat witness today, but he also wasn't ruffled by

Democrats who in some cases were calling for him to his face to resign. You have betrayed that trust. America deserves better. You should resign. We're calling him an embarrassment and comparing him to some of the president's staunchest political defenders. And he just trudged forward. He was not pulled into criticizing the president, nor did he give an inch on his own behavior. You, in effect, exonerated or cleared the president. No, I didn't exonerate. I said that we did not believe that there was sufficient evidence

to establish an obstruction offense, which is the job of the Justice Department. It felt like if Bill Barr was criticizing anybody or anything, and this was a bit of a surprise for me because my sense is that they have been friends for a long time, he was criticizing the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his office. This was one of the more remarkable aspects of his testimony today. of the more remarkable aspects of his testimony today. Time and again, he brought up his old friend, Bob Mueller, and essentially cast some, you know, blame onto him. Do you agree with the reasons that he offered for not making a decision in volume two of his report? And why or why not? I'm not really sure of his reasoning.

And then, very near the end of the hearing, after the senators had gone around and around on this letter, he described it as... You know, the letter's a bit snitty, and I think it was probably written by one of his staff people. Contempt may be too strong a word, but this is not the kind of reverence or relationship that we're accustomed to people talking about Bob Mueller with, and that we would probably expect from the attorney general towards

a special counsel who he's been working so closely with. Thank you. Well, my point of view is pretty interesting, and it got off in a ditch every now and then, but generally speaking, the committee did pretty good, and this is what democracy is all about. Thank you for being our attorney general. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It felt like the question before this testimony was what Congress was going to do now that they have the full Mueller report or the redacted Mueller report, what kind of oversight they would really pursue. And so I wonder what you think we learned on Wednesday from this testimony of Bill Barr about what that's going to look like and how this is going to play out over the next few months. So this was never going to be easy for

the Democrats. For one thing, President Trump relishes a fight. He thinks he benefits from fights. And so he was always going to be willing to take on Democrats, particularly in the House, who were investigating him. But I think what became really clear on Wednesday is just how sloppy and slow and complicated this process is going to be if Democrats really want to go all the way on some of these questions. What do you mean? You know, in five-minute chunks of time in public hearings, it's difficult to litigate complex legal issues. Right. Or detailed episodes that happened more than a year ago. And, you know, the Justice Department does not seem to want to lend

a hand to that process. I think that there were some clear targets that the hearing kind of sussed out today. The leading one is Bob Mueller. There seems to be a unified belief among Democrats that they need to hear from Bob Mueller, not just next, but quickly. But beyond that, I think they're going to have a difficult time, particularly with Republicans as unwilling investigative partners and the Justice Department and the White House as unwilling producers of witnesses and information getting far or ultimately achieving their end, which would be to lay this case out in a understandable, clear way for the American people to see and make a judgment. Nick, thank you very much.

We appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, sorry to interrupt, but we're hearing that. One second. We're hearing that Barr's not coming tomorrow. Okay. Can you confirm that? Because CNN and a couple of their outlets have it.

Let me see if it's... Okay, yeah, confirmed. Confirmed? Yeah, from a committee aide. Okay. All right, sorry, guys. So Barr's not coming tomorrow. Confirmed? Yeah, from a committee aide. Okay. All right, sorry, guys. So Barr is not going tomorrow.

On Wednesday afternoon, Nick confirmed that Bill Barr would not testify before the House Judiciary Committee today as planned because he objects to the format of the hearing, which involves the committee's lawyers, as well as its members, asking him questions. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, a British court sentenced Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail when he took refuge in Ecuador's embassy in London seven years ago. sexual assault and may still face charges in that country, but is also now being charged with conspiracy in the U.S., with federal prosecutors alleging he helped Chelsea Manning hack into a Pentagon computer network to illegally download classified information, much of it about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Assange was arrested last month after the Ecuadorian government withdrew its protection of him and allowed the police to take him out of the embassy in London. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.