U.S. Attorney General William Barr defended his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report on Wednesday amid new revelations that Mueller expressed frustration to Barr about how the attorney general was portraying the investigation's findings.
Barr's first appearance on Capitol Hill since releasing a redacted version of the report, presented a dramatic showdown as Democrats confronted him with allegations that he spun the investigation's findings in President Donald Trump's favour. Democrats were also likely to accuse him of misleading lawmakers last month when he suggested he was unaware of concerns on the Mueller team about his actions.
"The Deputy Attorney General and I knew that we had to make this assessment because, as I previously explained, the prosecutorial judgment whether a crime has been established is an integral part of the Department's criminal process," Barr said in his testimony. "The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office's work and conclusions," Mueller wrote.
Barr also is invited to appear Thursday before the Democratic-led House Judiciary panel, but the Justice Department said he would not testify if the committee insisted on having its lawyers question the attorney general. Barr says he released the report on his own even though he didn't have to under the special counsel regulations, and that doing so fulfilled a pledge he made at to be as transparent as the law allowed.
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