Following his production of a less-than-four-page letter “summarizing” the report from special counsel Robert Mueller, House Democratic leaders informed Attorney General William Barr that he had until April 2 to produce the full, unredacted report. However, it’s already clear that Barr is going to miss that deadline. In fact, he intends to miss every deadline. Because, as the Washington Post reports, Barr doesn’t intend to turn over the report at all.
In a conversation with Barr, Democratic Chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler got the same nonanswer that a Justice Department official produced on Wednesday: It will be “weeks” before the DOJ is ready to hand more over to Congress. And when it does, what it’s producing will not be the report from Mueller. Not even a redacted report from Mueller. It will be a second “summary” created by Barr and his staff, then run past the White House for further revisions before it’s sent to Capitol Hill.
Nadler stated that Barr would not promise that “an unredacted full report with the underlying documents, evidence, would be provided to Congress and to the American people.” With the New York Times reporting that the actual document turned over by Mueller exceeds 300 pages, the one-one-hundredth-scale document produced by Barr seems particularly ludicrous. The Barr letter contains not even a single complete sentence of the report from Mueller. Barr’s letter may accurately reflect the results of the investigation on specific issues, but the letter is so narrowly worded and carefully termed that it clearly leaves the great bulk of discoveries behind—and may be seriously misrepresenting how even the quotes provided fit into the larger context of the report.
Considering what’s already publicly known, it seems clear that the actual document from Mueller has to have some discussion of the over 100 meetings between Trump campaign staff or advisers and Russian operatives. Some of these meetings, like the Trump Tower meeting between Trump’s top campaign officials and Russian operatives, or Paul Manafort’s meetings with Konstantin Kilimnik, might have been taken off the table simply because the Russians involved were not officially representatives of the government. Other occasions, such as Jeff Sessions’ hour-long closed-door meeting with the Russian ambassador, might have been dropped due to a simple inability to discover more about what happened on that occasion. But whatever the reason, there has to be some justification included in the report for why these events don’t rise to the level of a conspiracy against the United States.
It may also be that some of the items that are known to the public were specifically removed from Mueller’s investigation as part of the instructions given to him by Rod Rosenstein. In addition to the well-known public letter authorizing Mueller to look into aspects of Russian interference and crimes arising from that investigation, Rosenstein sent Mueller a second letter. That second letter indicates that the apparent broad writ provided in the first statement was strictly for public consumption, and says that it contains the specific details of Mueller’s charge. Those details are still absolutely unknown.
Mueller was authorized to look into the crimes that led to money-laundering charges against Paul Manafort. But perhaps those charges aren’t out there for Trump simply because Rosenstein drew the same red line that Trump talked about earlier—a line specifically putting Trump’s business off limits.
Alternatively, Mueller’s report could be chock-a-block with crimes. He may have determined that Trump engaged in money laundering, tax fraud, bank fraud, and a list of potential crimes longer than his red tie. There’s no way to know that from the Barr letter, because it is so narrowly written that it doesn’t even discuss the whole of the possible ways in which the campaign might have conspired to work with Russia. It just takes two specific instances, absolves Trump of anything in those two rigidly defined slots, and pretends that’s a wrap.
It’s impossible to state how well Barr’s letter reflects the contents of the Mueller report, except to say that it’s 99 percent shorter. The actual Mueller report is lengthy enough that it seems impossible Barr could have read it, much less rewritten it, in well below 48 hours.
Besides acknowledging that Barr is refusing to comply with the April 2 deadline, Nadler gave little clue about next steps. However, he did state that April 2 is “a hard deadline that we set and we mean it.” That would seem to indicate that the DOJ and the House are headed for a court date.
Maybe in days, not weeks.