Mr. Barr’s deeply evasive testimony on Wednesday necessitates and tees up a full investigation in Congress . . .the American people have been misled by Attorney General Barr’s characterizations of the report and its conclusions . . . there is no more sacred duty for Congress than getting to the bottom of whether our president has taken care that the laws of this country have been faithfully executed
Neil Katyal, New York Times, 2 May 2019
Dear Friends,
It would be difficult to pick a moment in Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Attorney General William Barr hit bottom — probably in his exchanges with California Senator Kamala Harris and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whiteside — but the most revealing may have been his “Alexander HaIg moment,” where he described the Mueller Report as “my baby.’ While this had little to do with the content in question, it was an unmistakable attempt to put Robert Mueller ‘in his place’ (i. e., as an ‘inferior officer’) and a clarion assertion than rank matters. Later on, when he described Mueller’s letter as ’snitty’ and suggested it must have been written by one of Mueller’s staffers, the AG was exhibiting a barely concealed disdain for folks of lesser station.
Be that as it may . . .
To help readers make sense of the hearings, Attorney General Barr’s inexplicable performance and his inartful prevarications — many have used a stronger term — TMR recommends this keen, insightful analysis in The Atlantic by Brookings Institution and Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes.
Adding to Wittes, we enclose a New York Times' oped by Georgetown University law professor Neil Katyal, a former acting Solicitor General, and one of the authors of the 1999 special counsel legislation, whose views of Barr’s actions and comments reinforce and expand on Wittes’ observations.
We are under no illusions about what was happening in that committee room on Wednesday. All twelve members of the majority and one of the minority exhibited ‘conduct unbecoming’ for a serious discussion about the Mueller Report. Chairman Graham set the stage for the majority’s risible harping on the Clinton emails, rather than a serious inquiry about the cyberattacks on an American election by a geopolitical rival . . . the original impetus for the ‘witch hunt,’ or “Russian hoax,’ as President Donald Trump described it in his conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin this afternoon.
This story isn’t going away, no matter how assiduously and deceptively Team Trump works at making mincemeat of Mueller and mountains out of Barr’s allegations about ’spying,’ the facts of which are well-reported in today’s New York Times — https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/politics/fbi-government-investigator-trump.html? — And as we know, all those referrals to other jurisdictions — ‘children of the Mueller Report' — are matters of substance that will begin to see the light of day in the weeks and months ahead.
Stay tuned.
RGM
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