WASHINGTON ― U.S. Attorney General William Barr went to bat for U.S. President Donald Trump during a news conference Thursday morning ahead of the expected release of a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller's highly-anticipated report.
"President Trump faced an unprecedented situation," Barr said at a news conference at the U.S. Justice Department. "As he entered into office, and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates."
He continued: "At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the president's personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion."
Barr held the news conference at the Justice Department hours ahead of the expected release of a redacted version of Mueller's highly anticipated report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
The attorney general, in his remarks Thursday, discussed executive privilege, the Justice Department's interactions with the White House in the past few weeks and the process for redacting the special counsel's nearly 400-page report.
No material has been redacted based on executive privilege.U.S. Attorney General William Barr
Barr said no information had been redacted in the report based on executive privilege, though Trump would have been "well within his rights" to assert such a privilege.
"The president confirmed that, in the interests of transparency and full disclosure to the American people, he would not assert privilege over the special counsel's report," Barr said Thursday. "Accordingly, the public report I am releasing today contains redactions only for the four categories that I previously outlined, and no material has been redacted based on executive privilege."
Barr said earlier this month that Trump indicated he was leaving the decision on executive privilege to the attorney general. Barr said at the time that he had "no plan" to claim executive privilege to hold back any of the Mueller report.
Barr's decision to hold a news conference, alongside Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, before the reporters asking him questions were able to read the redacted report raised concerns that the Trump-appointed Justice Department official was spinning media coverage of the report in favour of the president.
Several Democratic chairs of U.S. House committees ― including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, Intel Chairman Adam Schiff and Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings ― issued a joint statement Wednesday calling on Barr to cancel his news conference.
Barr has already made a concerted effort to control the narrative around Mueller's investigation. When the special counsel completed his report in March, Barr opted against making the report public. Instead, the attorney general wrote a four-page letter to U.S. Congress he claimed summarized the principal conclusions in the report.
According to Barr, the special counsel did not find that Trump's campaign conspired with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Mueller declined to "make a traditional prosecutorial judgment" about whether Trump obstructed justice, Barr wrote. Instead of deferring to Congress on whether the president obstructed justice, the Attorney General took it upon himself to state that Mueller's report did not include enough evidence to establish Trump's guilt.
Barr's March letter prompted a series of misleading headlines about Mueller's findings. Trump immediately declared himself exonerated by the report, even though it had not yet been made public.
Barr's interpretation of Mueller's report was not surprising. Before he became attorney general, Barr sent Rosenstein an unsolicited memo arguing that the special counsel had no basis for even investigating whether the president obstructed justice.
The optics of a Trump-ally delivering the only publicly available summary of Mueller's findings enraged Democrats, who have called for access to the complete report and the underlying evidence. The version of the report expected to be made public later today will include redactions from Barr.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.