Sen. Patrick Leahy took issue Wednesday with William Barr over the attorney general’s conclusion that President Donald Trump had fully cooperated with Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the Vermont Democrat pointed to several instances in which the president had attempted to thwart investigators, including refusing to testify despite repeatedly saying publicly he would gladly be interviewed.
Leahy also highlighted Trump’s requests that aides orchestrate the firing of FBI Director James Comey and the president’s attempt to persuade former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his decision to recuse himself from the investigation.
“I don’t see any conflict between that and fully cooperating with an investigation,” Barr said.
In his initial line of questioning, Leahy called out Barr for previously giving what the senator said was “misleading” testimony on the Mueller report, referring to an April 9 statement to a House committee. In it, Barr said he didn’t know about frustrations expressed by Mueller’s team about the “limited information included” in his four-page summary of Mueller’s report. Leahy said that Barr, in fact, had known about the concerns for two weeks and said he was “somewhat troubled” by that testimony.
Barr said his denial was actually referring to a question “relating to unidentified members [of Mueller’s team] who were expressing frustration to the accuracy relating to the findings,” which he didn’t know about.
“I spoke to Bob Mueller, not members of his team,” Barr said. “And I did not know what was being referred to, and Mueller had never told me that the expression of the findings was inaccurate.”
Leahy did not let up on Barr, ultimately saying “Mr. Barr, I feel your answer was purposefully misleading and others do, too.”
During the rest of the hearing, Barr continued to defend his summary of the Mueller report, despite Mueller’s letter of criticism that became public Tuesday night. Barr said Mueller told him his bottom-line conclusions in the summary were accurate, but the media coverage was not.
