Democrats Intensify Attacks on Attorney General William Barr

New York: Democrats intensified their offensive against Attorney General William Barr as he prepared to release on Thursday a redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into alleged collusion between US President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia in the 2016 election. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler raised an objection to Barr speaking to the media before giving him the report, calling it “wrong”.

“The Attorney General appears to be waging a media campaign on behalf of President Trump... Rather than letting the facts of the report speak for themselves, the Attorney General has taken unprecedented steps to spin Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation,” Nadler said at a Wednesday night news conference here. The New York Times quoting unnamed sources reported that Justice Department officials had discussed the Mueller report with White House functionaries. This, Nadler said, “has helped them prepare a rebuttal response for the President”.

Soon after he received the Mueller report last month, Barr said in a summary sent to Congressional leaders that it had exonerated Trump of the collusion allegations, but it had not concluded either way if the President had obstructed justice by interfering with the inquiry. Unconvinced that the inquiry had cleared Trump, Democrats have demanded a copy of the entire report without redactions. Barr has said that he would edit out portions of the report that relate to intelligence agency secrets, testimony that is considered legally secret and innocent third parties. Nadler accused Barr of having “cherry-picked findings in his March 24th letter to Congress” and withholding “summaries written by the Special Counsel that were intended for public consumption”.

One of the hopes for the Democrats is that even if Trump is exonerated on the Russian collusion charges, the report may have something on which to pin the obstruction of justice charges, which Barr has dismissed. “Seems like it doesn’t ‘totally exonerate’ Trump,” Neal Katyal, who was the acting solicitor general in former President Barack Obama’s administration, said in a series of tweets. Barr had said in a testimony to a Congressional panel last week that Trump’s campaign had been spied on during Obama’s administration. (IANS)

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