From who - the Attorney General Bill Barr who acted as Trump's personal defense attorney instead of the head of the DoJ?
READ: The Justice Department's Summary Of The Mueller Report
A year later, a federal judge sharply rebuked Barr's handling of Mueller's report, saying Barr had made
"misleading public statements" to spin the investigation's findings in favor of Trump and had shown a "lack of candor."Aug 20, 2022
The Justice Department improperly withheld parts of an internal memo Attorney General William Barr cited in announcing that President Donald Trump had not obstructed justice, an appeals panel said.
www.npr.org
Judge Calls Barrās Handling of Mueller Report āDistortedā and āMisleadingā (Published 2020)
Hereās the now-familiar backstory: After Barr on March 24, 2019, released a summary of the Mueller report on President Donald Trumpās 2016 campaign and Russiaās interference in that
election, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III sent him a letter complaining that the summary failed to ā
fully capture the context, nature, and substanceā of his report and its conclusions. When the report itself came out the next month,
it became clear that Barrās summary had indeed been misleading in some significant ways. And eventually a federal judge ā a Republican-appointed one, no less ā issued a scathing review of the matter that called Barrās ācandorā and ācredibilityā into question.
In what was otherwise a relatively chummy interview, Maher did briefly press Barr on the subject of the summary, saying the way he āmischaracterizedā the Mueller report was āshady.ā
Barr defended his handling of the matter. But in doing so, he rolled out some of the most misleading aspects of his summary all over again.
āI felt that I had to say something to give the bottom line of what [Mueller] had decided,ā Barr said. āNumber one, I said that he had found there was no collusion.ā
This isnāt strictly accurate now, just as it wasnāt strictly accurate back when Barr first said it. In fact, as we came to find out,
Mueller said explicitly in his report that he wasnāt examining the nonlegal concept of collusion.
āCollusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law,ā the Mueller report reads. āFor those reasons, the Officeās focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law.ā
Barrās use of the āno collusionā phrasing was suspect not just because the report didnāt directly address it, but because it matched Trumpās own mantra and defined the amorphous term in a way Trump surely approved of. And itās arguably even more jarring today, given that a later bipartisan Senate report, released in August 2020, detailed perhaps the most significant example to date of a high-ranking Trump campaign aide working with someone it described as a āRussian intelligence officer.ā