Attorney General William Barr split with Robert Mueller on Thursday over Mueller’s decision to punt on whether Trump sought to obstruct his Russia investigation, saying the special counsel "could've reached a decision."
The rift between Barr and Mueller publicly reemerged after Mueller broke his silence on Wednesday following the nearly two year investigation.
In his first public comments, Mueller told reporters that charging Trump with anything was never “an option we could consider” due to a longstanding Department of Justice policy against charging a sitting president with a federal crime.While Mueller made clear the investigation operated under that framework, Barr told reporters last month that Mueller had not solely relied on the DOJ opinion when deciding whether Trump obstructed justice.
In a letter to lawmakers summarizing Mueller’s conclusions earlier this year, Barr said that because Mueller did not make a determination on obstruction, he and then-deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made the decisions themselves.
Asked whether he agreed with Mueller’s interpretation of the DOJ opinion, Barr said he felt differently.
“I personally felt he could’ve reached a decision,” he told CBS’s Jan Crawford in an interview set to air Friday. “The 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.”
Barr said he wouldn’t litigate Mueller’s reasoning for declining to make a decision one way or the other, telling Crawford the special counsel “had his reasons for not doing it, which he explained, and I’m not going to argue about those reasons.
”“But when he didn’t make a decision, the deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I felt it was necessary for us as the heads of the department to reach that decision,” Barr continued.
Democrats and even some Republicans have blasted Barr for at times fiercely defending Trump, accusing him of acting as the president’s personal lawyer rather than the country’s. Even Mueller reached out to the attorney general in the wake of his letter to Congress to express concern with how his findings had been portrayed.
Barr’s antagonizers have pointed to a letter Barr wrote last year, before being nominated for attorney general, in which he outlined his opinions on executive authority as they pertained to the Russia investigation. Barr and Rosenstein's call on obstruction, combined with Barr's defenses of Trump, have prompted a slew of calls for Barr to resign or be impeached by Congress.
The attorney general also tweaked Mueller for pointing out in his remarks Wednesday that per the Justice Department’s opinion, “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing,” which many read to mean impeachment proceedings.
“I’m not sure what he was suggesting, but the Department of Justice doesn’t use our powers of investigating crime as an adjunct to Congress,” Barr asserted.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine