DOJ comes out swinging in response to NYT and WaPo ‘bombshells’ on Barr mishandling Mueller report
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The Department of Justice came to the defense of Attorney General William Barr in a statement slamming new reports suggesting he mishandled his summary of Robert Mueller‘s report.
The DOJ rebuke came as anonymously-sourced reports by The New York Times and Washington Post have caused a feeding frenzy on the left over claims that members of Mueller’s team were not pleased with Barr summary released two weeks ago.
“Every page of the ‘confidential report’ provided to Attorney General Barr on March 22, 2019 was marked ‘May Contain Material Protected Under Fed. R. Crim. P. 6(e)’ – a law that protects confidential grand jury information – and therefore could not be publicly released,” DOJ spokesperson Keri Kupec said in a statement released Thursday.
“Given the extraordinary public interest in the matter, the Attorney General decided to release the report’s bottom-line findings and his conclusions immediately — without attempting to summarize the report — with the understanding that the report itself would be released after the redaction process,” Kupec added.
NEW: DOJ rebuts NYT/WAPO stories saying that they could not release the Mueller summaries to Congress b/c they were marked saying they could contain grand jury material. pic.twitter.com/lT4Kiblf0T
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) April 4, 2019
“As the Attorney General stated in his March 29th letter to Chairman Graham and Chairman Nadler, he does not believe the report should be released in ‘serial or piecemeal fashion.’ The Department continues to work with the Special Counsel on appropriate redactions to the report so that it can be released to Congress and the public,” the statement continued.
Barr had announced that the Justice Department will release the special counsel’s report on the Russia investigation to Congress by “mid-April, if not sooner,” after the redactions had been made in the approximately 400-page document. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were reportedly working with special counsel attorneys on redacting the material.