The attorney general's greatest sin is accuracy.
MAY 2, 2019
The day of Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony in front of the
Senate Judiciary Committee this week, there was, as always, a
selective leak dropped into the fray. With bated breath, we learned Special
Counsel Robert Mueller had sent the attorney general a sternly worded letter
grousing that Barr’s four-page March 24 explanation of the core conclusions of
the Mueller report “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance”
of the Mueller’s “work and conclusions.”
The customary histrionics followed. Posturing Democrats on the
judicial committee gave long soliloquies on Barr’s treacherous behavior. Sen.
Mazie Hirono (D–HI) accusedthe
attorney general of abusing his office and lying to Congress, and many others
demanded his resignation. The usual suspects called for impeachment.
Barr had
apparently masterminded the most inept cover-up in history, first by accurately
laying out the outcome of the special counsel’s investigation. Then, after some
light redactions (none instigated by the president), by releasing the report to
the public so everyone in the entire world could read it for themselves.
Now, if a
fresh observer to the Russia collusion circus only heard from Democrats, he
might not know that the Mueller report had been public for weeks—sifted through
and debated extensively. He certainly wouldn’t know that no criminality was
uncovered. But most people heard something else. And Barr’s greatest sin had
been preempting the collusion spin for the first time.
In
his initial letter, the attorney general informed the public, before media was able
to manipulate and confuse the core findings, that, despite its best efforts,
the special counsel—an open-ended, unimpeded investigation with virtually no
oversight—couldn’t find evidence to corroborate the prevailing myth that had
been perpetuated for more than two years by Democrats and the political media.
By
accurately conveying that the investigation had exonerated Trump and his
administration of criminal conspiracy or coordination with the Russians, two
years of ostensibly serious reporting was exposed as little more than
Resistance fan fiction. Rather than take a moment’s self-reflection about how
their actions had caused unprecedented political chaos, undermined trust in the
electoral system, and crowded out legitimate coverage of the presidency, the
entire collusion industry just moved its frenzied focus onto obstruction.
Well,
under oath, the attorney general confirmed that he had spoken to Mueller on the
phone and that the special counsel had been “very clear” that the AG’s letter
laying out the conclusions was not inaccurate. There’s been no evidence to
contradict his claim.
The AG’s
letter had also accurately conveyed that Mueller, who it seems spent a lot of
his efforts ferreting out unseemly Trumpian outbursts rather than finding
nefarious Russians, punted on charges of obstruction. Volume II of the Mueller
report, on the issue of obstruction, reads like a political document meant to
incite Democrats into doing what the investigation did not. And that is Barr’s
other sin: refusing to play Mueller’s game.
As National Review’s Rich Lowry noted,
Mueller’s letter “shows how the special counsel—or people around him—was deeply
concerned about the political spin around the report, especially if it wasn’t
damaging enough to Trump.” It’s quite telling that for more than two years, the
Mueller team only once thought
it important enough to debunk the media’s misleading coverage of collusion (and
this, probably when the investigation was functionally over) when there were
dozens of instances that could have warranted a similar reaction.
According to the law, Mueller’s job ended when he handed in his
report to the attorney general. Yet Barr, who was under no legal obligation to
release any of the findings, offered Mueller
a chance to review his letter before sending it to Congress. Mueller reportedly
declined, only offering his own summary after the
Barr letter had been released.
For Democrats and their allies, an investigation “not clearing”
someone makes that someone as good as guilty if he happens to be a Republican.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D–CA) actually accused Barr
of failing to revisitthe underlying evidence in Mueller’s report before making a
decision on obstruction. The same Democrats who acted apoplectic when Barr took
a couple of weeks to go through redactions in the 400-page report want Trump’s
AG to sift through the underlying evidence of a two-year,
$35 million investigation and make his own recommendations … when, a
year from now? What was the point of the Mueller report, then?
Barr accepted the finding of the special counsel and made his
legal judgment based on the evidence and arguments as outlined by Mueller. If
Democrats disagree with his legal reasoning, they have a constitutional remedy
called impeachment. Are all the liberal pundits and news outlets pretending
that Harris’s line of inquiry is shrewd, really arguing that Barr
should act as if there might be a smoking gun buried in the evidence that
Mueller himself didn’t deem worthy to bring forward in his report? What would
the reaction be if Barr investigated and found the evidence less compelling
than the Mueller report’s framing? Would Democrats accept Barr’s findings? It’s
absurd, and another sign of how this is all just partisan bluster.
Another
thing Mueller didn’t seem at all concerned about was whether the Trump-Russian
collusion conspiracy had been initiated or stoked by Russians. Those clamoring
for transparency when useful—now acting as if investigating how the entire
country was thrown into a panic over non-existent Russian infiltration of the
White House is absurd—are the true conspiracy theorists.
Yet Barr, who dropped some interesting
tidbits in yesterday’s hearings, seems willing to investigate the
impetus of the Russia “collusion” investigation, the role of the infamous
dossier, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants used by
the previous administration for “spying.” Now that Trump has been cleared of
criminal conspiracy, it seems reasonable for the American people to have an
understanding of how the Obama administration rationalized spying on its
political rivals during a presidential election.
Perhaps
it will be vindicated, or perhaps someone will find evidence of abuse of power.
Either way, in a healthy media environment, such a story would launch a massive
investigatory effort. Today, it seems, the political media would rather engage
in a concerted effort with Democrats to preemptively smear Barr.
David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He
is the author of the book, First
Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the
Revolution to Today. Follow
him on Twitter.
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