One Week Into the Fight Over the Mueller Report, Battle Lines Are Drawn

The numbers were there at the top of Attorney General William Barr’s March 24 letter to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees: 22 months, 19 attorneys, 40 FBI agents and investigators, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witnesses. After everything that went into special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign, Barr’s four-page summary of its conclusions was anticlimactic—to everyone but the president. Although Mueller didn’t find sufficient evidence to establish that the campaign “conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government, and Barr determined that the findings didn’t warrant an obstruction charge, there may still be plenty in the report that the White House would want to keep secret, and that Democrats would desperately want to see. Even before the special counsel’s investigation ended, the squabble over who’d get access to its contents had already begun.

In June 2018, before he was nominated to his current post, Barr wrote an unsolicited memo arguing that the Mueller team shouldn’t have standing to question Trump on obstruction of justice unless it had already established collusion with Russia. Mueller gave Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein advance warning on March 5 that he wouldn’t make a determination on obstruction. But still, the Justice Department’s quick turnaround on the question—within 48 hours of announcing it had received the report—only adds to congressional Democrats’ distrust.