The nation’s top law enforcement official and his DOJ legal team determined the president did not violate the law, going a step further in an interview to say that much of Mueller’s legal analysis “did not reflect the views of the department.”
Attorney General William Barr disagreed with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s lack of a definitive conclusion on whether President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice regarding matters related to the Russia probe.
Those statements seemed to contradict his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee May 1 about his rollout of the Mueller report, in which he told lawmakers in his prepared remarks that “we accepted the special counsel’s legal framework for purposes of our analysis and evaluated the evidence as presented by the special counsel in reaching our conclusion.
Barr’s remarks to CBS, where he detailed his disagreement with Mueller’s legal analysis, came the day after the former special counsel took the extraordinary step of making a public, on-camera statement at the Justice Department—the first of its kind since Mueller took lead of the probe in 2017.
“He could've reached a conclusion,” Barr said. “The [Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel] opinion says you cannot indict a president while he is in office, but he could've reached a decision as to whether it was criminal activity. But he had his reasons for not doing it, which he explained, and I am not going to, you know, argue about those reasons.”
“Congress is a separate branch of government and they can—they have processes, we have our processes,” he elaborated. “Ours are related to the criminal justice process we are not an extension of Congress's investigative powers.” "It's part of the craziness of the modern day that if a president uses a word, then all of a sudden it becomes off bounds," he said."It's a perfectly good English word. I will continue to use it."
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