Some on Mueller’s Team Say Report Was More Damaging Than Barr Revealed
Attorney
General William P. Barr has shown hints of frustration with how the
rollout of the special counsel’s chief findings has unfolded.CreditSarah Silbiger/The New York Times
Image
WASHINGTON
— Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates
that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the
findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for
President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government
officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.
At
stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr
and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial
understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations
in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned
that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special
counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the
investigation’s conclusions become public.
Mr.
Barr has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page
report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special
counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the
report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included
more of their material in the four-page letter
he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to
government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only
briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: New Insights Into the Mueller Report
The attorney general turned a report of nearly 400 pages into a four-page summary. Members of the special counsel’s team say something was lost.
transcript
0:00/25:58
Listen to ‘The Daily’: New Insights Into the Mueller Report
Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Theo Balcomb, Lisa Tobin and Paige Cowett, and edited by Larissa Anderson
The
attorney general turned a report of nearly 400 pages into a four-page
summary. Members of the special counsel’s team say something was lost.
michael barbaro
From
The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today:
The Mueller team sent its report to the attorney general, William Barr.
The attorney general sent a summary of that report to Congress. Now, new
reporting shows members of Mueller’s team feel that Barr’s summary did
not reflect the report they wrote. It’s Thursday, April 4. So take us
back to the beginning of last week. What do we know at that point?
nicholas fandos
So
we knew that Bill Barr, taking Bob Mueller’s 300- to 400-page report,
had gone through it extensively and boiled down what he called the
“principal conclusions” to just four pages.
michael barbaro
Nick Fandos covers Congress. Mike Schmidt covers national security.
michael schmidt
We
were in this unusual situation where the special counsel, Robert
Mueller, had sent his report to the attorney general, said, I found no
evidence that the campaign conspired with Russia to impact the election.
But he declined to make a decision on obstruction.
nicholas fandos
And
what he said was Mueller didn’t reach what Barr called a “traditional
prosecutorial decision.” In other words, Mueller presented evidence for
the fact that the president may have obstructed justice but didn’t go as
far as to conclude that he had. He essentially punted to the attorney
general’s office.
michael schmidt
And
in this case, by Mueller not reaching a determination, he leaves the
door open for Barr to come in to say, O.K., Mueller didn’t make a
determination on this issue of obstruction. He did on collusion. I’m
going to look at all the facts. And he makes his determination — no case
to be made here on both of these issues. The problem, though, is that
the perception is that Mueller, the independent investigator who’s there
to do an inquiry free of politics, has not made a call on this central
question. But Barr, the president’s appointee, who’s been there just for
a few months, is making the decision. So the question is, is the fix
in? Why is it, if Mueller didn’t come to an answer, the attorney general
did?
michael barbaro
So
at the beginning of last week, we know that Mueller made the unusual
decision not to make a call. And Barr made the unusual decision to make a
call. And the question is, why?
michael schmidt
It’s
not unusual that Barr made a call. The Justice Department is there to
decide whether people broke the law or not. And he was doing that.
What’s different and unusual here is that Barr and Mueller don’t look
like they’re on the same page.
[music]
michael schmidt
Mueller
said, I can’t make a determination on this issue. And Barr did. So why
is it that they looked at it differently? Why was it that Mueller, the
prosecutor here, didn’t do the one thing that prosecutors at the Justice
Department do, which is make a call?
nicholas fandos
And
that was the question that we’ve spent the last week trying to figure
out. What is the difference here? What is the evidence that they’re
looking at? And why did Mueller and Barr make the decisions that they
made around this question of obstruction of justice?
michael barbaro
And what have we now learned?
nicholas fandos
What
we’ve now learned is that nobody’s happy. The team that was working —
or at least some of the team that was working with Bob Mueller feels
that Barr stepped in and filled the vacuum in a way that didn’t properly
capture what their 22-month investigation found. And Barr’s team feels
that Bob Mueller fell short of doing his job.
michael barbaro
So let’s start with the Barr side. Explain more about why the attorney general and those around him are upset.
michael schmidt
So
in not reaching a decision on obstruction of justice, Barr has to go
out on his own and make that determination without the top cover of the
independent investigator who went out and was supposed to make a
determination on whether the president broke the law.
michael barbaro
And what do you mean by “top cover“?
michael schmidt
One
of the reasons you have a special counsel is to insulate an
investigation from politics and then, when the investigation is
concluded, have a way of holding up the product of the inquiry, the
fruits of it, to the public and saying, look, this was done free of
politics. We assessed this matter based on the facts. And now you have a
result that is exposed, at least in part, to the perception that the
president’s guy made the decision.
michael barbaro
The attorney general.
michael schmidt
Correct.
nicholas fandos
Undercutting one of the key points of Mueller’s appointment in the first place.
michael barbaro
And you’re saying that the people in the Justice Department and that Barr himself are upset to be put in that position?
michael schmidt
Well,
the system’s not working the way it’s supposed to. You had Mueller
there for one reason — yea or nay on crimes. And on one of these central
questions, he couldn’t get there. And by stepping back and saying, I
don’t know, it allows at least the Democrats to say, what? How was this
decision made? How did they get to this? How is it that the president’s
political appointee was the ultimate decider?
nicholas fandos
And
it gives them real credence to go and say, we need to see all the
evidence. We need to see the whole file here because the president’s
handpicked man made this decision. Maybe we’d reach a different
conclusion if we looked at the evidence. Bob Mueller seems to have.
michael barbaro
So
then why did Barr choose to make a call on obstruction of justice if he
knew and was upset that this was going to be seen as hyper-political
and that it would fan the flames of Democrats in Congress?
nicholas fandos
The
problem for Barr was that when he got the report and looked at the
evidence, to him, it was a pretty clear case that you would not press
this kind of charge, that the president hadn’t obstructed justice. Now,
you’ve got to remember that Barr comes to the job with a pretty
expansive view of executive power. As Democrats made famous, he wrote a
memo before he was appointed attorney general arguing that certain acts
by the president shouldn’t be construed as obstruction of justice.
They’re part of his executive powers. And so he looked at this and, I
mean, he can’t make the same decision that Mueller did. Somebody has to
make a choice about whether or not this is a chargeable offense. And he
looked at it and says, well, in our judgment and this team’s judgment,
it’s not.
michael barbaro
So
Barr reads the report and thinks, what are you talking about it’s not
clear whether or not there was obstruction of justice? There, in his
mind, clearly wasn’t.
nicholas fandos
Barr
does acknowledge that there is evidence, basically, of behavior that
could be construed as obstructive. He gives credence to what Mueller is
presenting but says, when you add it all up, it doesn’t tip into —
michael schmidt
Criminality.
nicholas fandos
— criminal obstructive territory.
michael barbaro
Right.
And while it felt political for Barr to reach a conclusion, to make a
call that Mueller wouldn’t, I have to think it would have felt even more
political in Barr’s mind for Congress to be the one to perform that
role. And so he was upset to have to make this call, but, it sounds
like, felt that he had to.
michael schmidt
I
don’t know if he’s upset as much as he looks at this situation and
says, this is not the way it’s supposed to be working. Someone needs to
make a decision on whether the president broke the law. I’ll step in and
do that. And I think I can do that based on the facts.
nicholas fandos
And
Congress can still play a role. I’m redacting the report. I’ll give it
to you with sensitive information blacked out. And then you can make
your own judgment. But the public has an intense interest in this. And
I’ve got to say something. And I decide whether acts broke the law or
not. And I don’t think this one did.
michael barbaro
Do we know if Mueller’s team expected Barr to make this call on obstruction of justice after they declined to do so?
nicholas fandos
We
don’t know precisely what the Mueller team expected on this obstruction
question. It seems that they were not clear in communicating to the
Justice Department what they wanted. It may not have mattered anyway.
But what we do know is that after Barr came out with this four-page
summary, which essentially exonerated the president on collusion and
said he did not break the law on obstruction, some members of Mr.
Mueller’s team felt that he had inadequately and only partially
represented the work of their 22-month investigation.
michael barbaro
So
this is the other side of your reporting — that not only was the Barr
side disappointed with the Mueller side, the Mueller side was
disappointed with the Barr side.
nicholas fandos
What
we have learned is that since Barr made his public statement about a
week ago, members of the Mueller team have told associates that they
feel, essentially, that his work — if it wasn’t misrepresentative of
theirs — didn’t give the full picture, which they believe is more
damaging to the president than the attorney general’s letter lets on.
Now, we are not saying that every member of the Mueller team is
frustrated by this. We don’t know what Bob Mueller himself thinks. He
remains one of the black boxes at the center of this investigation. But
there are members of the team who were involved in the decision-making
around these issues that we’ve been talking about who have watched and
been disappointed and angry about how it’s being characterized.
michael barbaro
And what is the focus of their disappointment, to the degree you understand it?
nicholas fandos
So
when they read Bill Barr’s concise four-page letter, they were
frustrated that he had not drawn more from their own work. And in fact,
what we discovered in reporting this piece out is that they had prepared
summaries of their own work that were part of the report that they
handed over to the Justice Department a couple of weeks ago and felt
that some of that material could have easily been drawn into what Mr.
Barr handed over. So not that he shouldn’t have made a decision about
whether the president obstructed justice or not in a criminal sense, but
that concurrent with that, he should have put out more of their
evidence or analysis to fill out the public picture. The Justice
Department says those summaries had sensitive information in them,
classified information, secretive grand jury information that couldn’t
become public, and ultimately didn’t use any of it.
michael schmidt
So
what Mueller’s folks are essentially saying is, hey, we wrote these
summaries. If you were going to go out and say something about this
investigation, and you were going to do something as extreme or as
declarative as clearing the president, why is it that you didn’t include
some of the things that we found?
michael barbaro
And
specifically, why didn’t you include some stuff that we found that was
pretty damning? You’re making it seem like the president didn’t do
anything wrong.
michael schmidt
Donald
Trump has come out in the days after Barr’s declaration and said the
Mueller report was beautiful. And it completely exonerates him. If
you’re an investigator who spent the last two years looking at Donald
Trump, and you think there’s a lot of questionable behavior there, that
is something that is going to irritate you mightily.
michael barbaro
I
mean, do either of you think that the Mueller people have a legitimate
point here? Or is this a classic case of pride of authorship? They
wanted to see their work in the public summary.
nicholas fandos
I
don’t think that we fully know. What seems clear in our reporting is
that there was no specific communication or agreement by the Mueller
team to the Barr team — you should use these things, or we want these
things to be out. They seem to have had an intention. And they certainly
now have a regret about it. But we don’t know what interaction there
was in the actual decision-making process that happened that weekend two
weeks ago.
michael barbaro
Well,
so why do we think that Barr chose not to include more of what was in
these summaries, especially the negative material, in his four-page
summary?
michael schmidt
I
think there’s one big, broad reason and another contemporary reason,
the broad reason being that Barr and many Justice Department officials
and, for many years, prosecutors believe that if they decide not to
charge someone, the fruits of the investigation should not be just
thrown out there for the public or for the enemies of the person who
were investigated.
michael barbaro
Dirty laundry should not be aired if the subject of those dirty laundry are not charged with a crime.
michael schmidt
If
you cannot meet this incredibly high bar of bringing a federal
prosecution, that doesn’t mean you then get to just take the trash and
just throw it out in the street and let the public rummage through it.
michael barbaro
And Mike, by the contemporary example you referred to, I’m assuming you’re talking about James Comey.
michael schmidt
I’m
talking about the July 2016 press conference that James Comey held.
It’s right in the heat of the presidential election. He stands up and
says, we, the F.B.I., have done this investigation into Hillary
Clinton’s use of a private email account. We don’t think there is a case
to be made here. But we found some very questionable behavior in how
she handled sensitive national security secrets. The press conference
was seen as very damaging to Clinton even though a case was never made.
michael barbaro
And
so you’re saying that Barr’s view would be, I’m not going to be the one
to replicate that by drawing from these Mueller team summaries and
putting those out into the public sphere.
michael schmidt
Correct.
We don’t use criminal investigations to go out and find damaging things
that may not be crimes that we then simply release to the public to be
used against someone.
nicholas fandos
The
problem is, this was never a normal or average criminal investigation.
It has broad national security implications. And it has implications for
almost every decision that’s made at the highest levels of the
government.
michael schmidt
This
is more about a pathway of how you deal with the president’s conduct.
And what it appears from the Mueller side is that they’re saying, look,
this is the president of the United States. There’s some conduct here
that we think the public and Congress should see. And O.K., Justice
Department, it may not be criminal. But this is the president. And this
needs to be examined more thoroughly by the political process and by
Congress. It’s about a pathway of dealing with the president.
nicholas fandos
And
Bill Barr doesn’t seem to disagree with that, fundamentally. He said
throughout that he wants to make as much of this report public as
possible. But he doesn’t think that that absolves him of the Justice
Department’s role of saying whether or not the president or his campaign
broke the law. And so he’s grappling with the Justice Department’s
aversion to talk about individuals that it’s not saying broke the law.
But yet he knows that the public and the Congress want and probably are
owed more information about what did happen. And so he’s kind of
operating somewhere in the middle of those two things.
michael schmidt
The
difference here is that if I was under investigation, and the Justice
Department determined that I didn’t break the law, then there’s no other
process that really needs to be dealt with me. Maybe my company needs
to decide whether I get fired or not for that conduct. In this instance,
there’s another issue with the president. O.K., the president didn’t
break the law. But maybe the president did things with his power that
the public should know about, Congress should know about, and need to be
more closely examined. Because maybe it’s not just about breaking the
law. It’s about how he conducted himself as president. And does Congress
need to deal with that? And what we are starting to see from Mueller’s
side is this frustration that, hey, we think there’s some bad stuff that
happened here. But by Barr coming out and not disclosing that but
saying the president didn’t break the law, he is casting the die on how
the public will later look at the president’s conduct. It will say that
for several weeks after we finished our report, the only thing that was
out there was Bill Barr saying the president didn’t break the law, and
the president turning around and saying, I was fully exonerated. And
they’re saying, hey, America, we think more of this process needs to
play out.
michael barbaro
Right.
michael schmidt
So
this all comes down to the vexing question of, how do we investigate a
sitting president? And how is that done in a way that the public has the
utmost confidence in that? And in that is this tension between how much
independence the investigator should have. In Nixon, that pendulum
swung too far in the president’s direction. In the Starr investigation
of Clinton, it went the other way. The investigator had too much power.
And here, between Mueller and Barr’s teams, they are fighting that same
fight and have different understandings of how this should all be dealt
with. And it’s the same issue that we’ve been looking at for 50 years,
just the latest episode of it.
michael barbaro
So
inside of one presidential investigation, these two teams are embodying
all the tensions that have basically been present since Watergate.
nicholas fandos
Correct.
michael schmidt
It’s
how much you can tell the public, and how is apparent misconduct by the
president dealt with? And there’s no clear pathway on that. So whatever
Barr does will be viewed by one side as political and laying on the
brakes for the president. Whatever Mueller does will be viewed by the
president’s enemies as trying to get him. And the confidence in that
process then erodes. And it’s messy. And it’s hard to figure out. What
are the real facts here? What really happened?
michael barbaro
But
at this point, we’re just talking about the summary that Bill Barr sent
to Congress. We’re still waiting on the full report. So won’t this
tension that you’re describing eventually be more or less resolved when
we learn how much information we’ll ultimately have access to?
nicholas fandos
It
may be. And we may see a very different set of facts at the end of the
day. But I think the question here is about who sets the narrative for
the intervening period of time. It may end up being a month before we
see a fuller version of the Mueller report. And for that time, Bill
Barr’s conclusion that the president didn’t break the law is going to be
the dominant narrative. And I think that what we’re hearing from
members of the Mueller team is a concern that by the time their fuller
work does come out, the narrative is baked — so much so that even if it
shows, for instance, that the president didn’t break the law but abused
his office or conducted acts that Congress will deem inappropriate for
his office, that there’s not room to have a full debate around that,
that the conclusions about the work that they did for 22 months will
have been prejudged at that point, and that it won’t quite matter what
the report says for the president’s political fate.
michael barbaro
Nick, Mike, thank you very much.
nicholas fandos
Thank you guys.
michael schmidt
Thanks for having us.
archived recording (jerry nadler)
The
committee has a job to do. The Constitution charges Congress with
holding the president accountable for alleged official misconduct.
michael barbaro
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee voted to authorize the use of subpoenas to obtain a full copy of the Mueller report.
archived recording (jerry nadler)
That
job requires us to evaluate the evidence for ourselves — not the
attorney general’s summary, not a substantially redacted synopsis, but
the full report and the underlying evidence.
michael barbaro
The
committee’s chairman, Democratic representative Jerry Nadler of New
York, said he would not immediately issue a subpoena. But his power to
do so will intensify pressure on the attorney general, William Barr, to
quickly release an unredacted copy of the report.
archived recording (jerry nadler)
I
will give him time to change his mind. But if we cannot reach an
accommodation, then we will have no choice but to issue subpoenas for
these materials.
michael barbaro
We’ll be right back.
[music]
michael barbaro
Here’s
what else you need to know today. A Times analysis of deadly terror
attacks involving white extremists has found that at least a third of
them were inspired by fellow white men who carried out similar attacks
and had either professed admiration for them or interest in their
tactics. In one case, a school shooter in New Mexico corresponded with a
gunman who attacked a mall in Munich. All together, the two men killed
11 people. The connections between the killers crossed continents and
highlight how the internet and social media have spread white extremism.
And —
archived recording (joe biden)
I’ve
always tried to be — in my career, I’ve always tried to make a human
connection. That’s my responsibility, I think. I shake hands. I hug
people. I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, you can do this.
michael barbaro
On
Wednesday, former vice president Joe Biden responded to a series of
complaints from women that his close physical contact had made them
uncomfortable.
archived recording (joe biden)
Our
social norms have begun to change. They’ve shifted. And the boundaries
of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it. I get it. I
hear what they’re saying. I understand it.
michael barbaro
In
a video message sent as Biden prepares for a possible presidential run,
he defended his behavior but said he is able to change.
archived recording (joe biden)
But I’ll always believe governing, quite frankly — life, for that matter — is about connecting.
michael barbaro
That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.
Advertisement
However,
the special counsel’s office never asked Mr. Barr to release the
summaries soon after he received the report, a person familiar with the
investigation said. And the Justice Department quickly determined that
the summaries contain sensitive information, like classified material,
secret grand-jury testimony and information related to current federal
investigations that must remain confidential, according to two
government officials.
Mr.
Barr was also wary of departing from Justice Department practice not to
disclose derogatory details in closing an investigation, according to
two government officials familiar with Mr. Barr’s thinking. They pointed
to the decision by James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, to
harshly criticize Hillary Clinton in 2016 while announcing that he was
recommending no charges in the inquiry into her email practices.
The
officials and others interviewed declined to flesh out why some of the
special counsel’s investigators viewed their findings as potentially
more damaging for the president than Mr. Barr explained, although the
report is believed to examine Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the
investigation. It was unclear how much discussion Mr. Mueller and his
investigators had with senior Justice Department officials about how
their findings would be made public. It was also unclear how widespread
the vexation is among the special counsel team, which included 19
lawyers, about 40 F.B.I. agents and other personnel.
At
the same time, Mr. Barr and his advisers have expressed their own
frustrations about Mr. Mueller and his team. Mr. Barr and other Justice
Department officials believe the special counsel’s investigators fell
short of their task by declining to decide whether Mr. Trump illegally
obstructed the inquiry, according to the two government officials. After
Mr. Mueller made no judgment on the obstruction matter, Mr. Barr
stepped in to declare that he himself had cleared Mr. Trump of
wrongdoing.
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Representatives
for the Justice Department and the special counsel declined to comment
on Wednesday on views inside both Mr. Mueller’s office and the Justice
Department. They pointed to departmental regulations requiring Mr.
Mueller to file a confidential report to the attorney general detailing
prosecution decisions and to Mr. Barr’s separate vow to send a redacted
version of that report to Congress. Under the regulations, Mr. Barr can
publicly release as much of the document as he deems appropriate.
A
debate over how the special counsel’s conclusions are represented has
played out in public as well as in recent weeks, with Democrats in
Congress accusing Mr. Barr of intervening to color the outcome of the
investigation in the president’s favor.
In his letter to Congress
outlining the report’s chief conclusions, Mr. Barr said that Mr.
Mueller found no conspiracy between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia’s
2016 election interference. While Mr. Mueller made no decision on his
other main question, whether the president illegally obstructed the
inquiry, he explicitly stopped short of exonerating Mr. Trump.
Mr.
Mueller’s decision to skip a prosecutorial judgment “leaves it to the
attorney general to determine whether the conduct described in the
report constitutes a crime,” Mr. Barr wrote. He and his deputy, Rod J.
Rosenstein, decided that the evidence was insufficient to conclude that
Mr. Trump had committed an obstruction offense.
Mr.
Barr has come under criticism for sharing so little. But according to
officials familiar with the attorney general’s thinking, he and his
aides limited the details they revealed because they were worried about
wading into political territory. Mr. Barr and his advisers expressed
concern that if they included derogatory information about Mr. Trump
while clearing him, they would face a storm of criticism like what Mr.
Comey endured in the Clinton investigation.
Video
Legal
experts attacked Mr. Comey at the time for violating Justice Department
practice to keep confidential any negative information about anyone
uncovered during investigations. The practice exists to keep from
unfairly sullying people’s reputations without giving them a chance to
respond in court.
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