William Barr is a fake Attorney General because he lied to Congress

This is an echo opinion published in Bloomberg.

Fake Attorney General William Barr is cornered by Robert Mueller- an echo opinion published in The Spokesman-Review by Timothy L. O'Brien, editor for Bloomberg.

Fake Attorney General Barr lied to Congress and doing so was a crime.  

During a congressional hearing on April 9, Rep. Charlie Crist, a Florida Democrat, asked Attorney General William Barr if he knew why Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators were reportedly upset about a recent letter released by Barr. The missive summarized the Mueller team’s still unpublished findings from its conspiracy and obstruction probe involving Donald Trump, with his advisers and Russia.

“Reports have emerged recently, general, that members of the special counsel’s team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24th letter. That it does not adequately or accurately, necessarily, portray the report’s findings,” Crist said. “Do you know what they are referencing with that?

“No, I don’t,” Barr responded. “I suspect that they probably wanted more put out.”

A day later, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, pursued a similar line of questioning and noted that Barr’s summary went well beyond the Mueller report’s findings by unilaterally absolving Trump of obstruction. 

“Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?” Van Hollen asked.

“I don’t know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion,” Barr replied.

Just how honest and candid Barr was with Congress is now in play. 

As it turns out, Mueller himself wasn’t comfortable with Barr’s take on his work and he wrote to the Justice Department on March 27 to complain about it in detail – almost exactly two weeks before Barr began testifying otherwise to Crist and Van Hollen.

Mueller told the Justice Department (and Barr in a subsequent phone call) that the attorney general’s four-page memo outlining the report’s primary conclusions “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the investigation, according to a copy of Mueller’s letter that the Washington Post disclosed on Tuesday.

“There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation,” Mueller wrote. “This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

During his call with Barr, Mueller also told the attorney general that “he was concerned that media coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings” about the special counsel’s report, the Post reported. The newspaper also noted that some of Mueller’s investigators felt that “the evidence they had gathered – especially on obstruction – was far more alarming and significant than how Barr had described it.”

Barr testified again on Wednesday before Congress, for the first time since the 448-page Mueller report was released publicly on April 18. The report offered a portrait of Trump and his team acting in much more sinister and purposefully illicit ways than Barr suggested in his summary, and in the odd little bit of media spinning and political theater he engaged in during a press conference ahead of the report’s release.

In prepared remarks he issued hours prior to Wednesday’s testimony, Barr defended the decisions he’s made at the Justice Department and presented himself as guardian of the rule of law. 

“It would not have been appropriate for me simply to release,” the Mueller report’s own inconclusive take on whether Trump obstructed justice “without making a prosecutorial judgment,” Barr allows.

Still, what we have in Barr is a subtler and more emotionally disciplined version of Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s most prominent pit-bull attorneys. Barr often seems content to placate the president’s legal adversaries to keep them off balance or to lay down verbal smokescreens that confuse the media.

At first blush, it’s strange that Barr didn’t seem to see a rebuke from Mueller coming and prepare for that. On the other hand, Barr has moved in and out of Washington’s power circles for years and one of his fortes involves developing ways for presidents to avoid scrutiny or culpability. 

Maybe he doesn’t care too much about what Mueller thinks.

Trump has a long history of co-opting those who spend a lot of time around him, but Barr arrived in the White House ready to rumble and with an expansive view of executive authority. He and his boss were a perfect fit.

Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion.