Garrett M. Graff writes:

The Mueller report has been sitting in the Justice Department for nearly two weeks. Attorney general William Barr told Congress Wednesday he’s hoping the public will finally get a look at the 300-plus page document sometime within the next week, ending a bizarre period of dissembling and fumbling by Barr that has left America with more questions than answers about the seriousness of what Mueller uncovered.

That public release, when it comes, will thankfully end the current liminal period where Barr’s own summary of the report—which he subsequently denied was a summary—has stood as the only public statement on the final findings of a 22-month probe that led to charges against dozens of individuals—including Russian intelligence officers—and yielded around $50 million in forfeitures and fines, yet evidently stopped short of indicting the president or his family themselves. So far, the public has seen less than 70 words of Mueller’s own conclusions, not a single complete sentence among them.

Yet two days of testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday and Wednesday have done little to calm growing concerns that Barr is acting to obfuscate the worst findings of Mueller’s two-year probe as special counsel.

At nearly every turn, Barr stonewalled and seemed to contradict himself or Justice Department precedent. He argued consistently that the report was nuanced enough he couldn’t discuss or release it piecemeal, even though he himself rushed out his “topline conclusions” in just 48 hours. He declined to explain Mueller’s reasoning for refusing to make a “traditional prosecutorial decision” on the question of whether Donald Trump obstructed justice, an important answer given how Barr stepped in to offer his own verdict—even as he quoted Mueller saying the report “does not exonerate” the president on obstruction. And, perhaps most confounding, Barr said he did not plan to ask for a court’s permission to release the grand jury testimony included in Mueller’s report, as was done in Watergate and Whitewater. [Continue reading…]

Benjamin Wittes writes:

Attorney General Bill Barr’s statements today on supposed “spying” by the FBI on the Trump campaign before the Senate Appropriations Committee were indefensible. They at once indecipherable and contentless, on the one hand, and incendiary, on the other hand.

I am not one of the many people looking to think ill of Barr. Indeed, I have taken a lot of heat recently for being willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the specific issue of his production of a redacted version of the Mueller report. That said, his comments today were reckless. They will play into gross conspiracy theories. They are also unfair to the individuals whom Barr suggested had engaged in some sort of unspecified wrongdoing. [Continue reading…]