Shocker: Barr’s Summary of Mueller Report Might Be Fishy

Ellen Nakashima, Carol D. Leonnig, and Rosalind S. Helderman, reporting for The Washington Post:

“There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead,” according to one U.S. official briefed on the matter.

Summaries were prepared for different sections of the report, with a view that they could made public, the official said.

The report was prepared “so that the front matter from each section could have been released immediately — or very quickly,” the official said. “It was done in a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself.”

Mueller’s team assumed the information was going to be made available to the public, the official said, “and so they prepared their summaries to be shared in their own words — and not in the attorney general’s summary of their work, as turned out to be the case.”

Imagine the right’s reaction if there had been a two-year independent counsel investigation of Barack Obama, led by Robert Mueller, regarding election malfeasance and obstruction of justice, and when completed, attorney general Eric Holder released nothing but his own 4-page summary that basically said “nothing to look at here”.

I’m sure that would have flown.

I don’t know if it’s going to happen in days, weeks, or months, but the Mueller report will be released. This Barr summary is such a ham-fisted gambit — it really doesn’t make any sense at all if the report actually looks good for Trump.

★ Thursday, 4 April 2019