By Ben
Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday released his opening statement ahead of his testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he said he felt “it would not have been appropriate” to release the section of the Mueller report about possible obstruction of justice “without making a prosecutorial decision.”
He and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein therefore conducted a review of the Special Counsel’s findings and determined it was “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” he wrote in the remarks.
“The Deputy Attorney General and I knew that we had to make this assessment because . . . the prosecutorial judgment whether a crime has been established is an integral part of the Department’s criminal process,” he wrote.
“Given the extraordinary public interest in this investigation . . . I determined that it was necessary to make as much of it public as I could and committed the Department to being as transparent as possible,” he added. “But it would not have been appropriate for me simply to release Volume II [about possible obstruction of justice] of the report without making a prosecutorial judgment.”
In the investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller determined President Trump’s 2016 campaign did not collude with Russia to interfere in the presidential election, but they did not come to a conclusion on if he obstructed justice.
The release of Barr’s opening statement came after reports surfaced Tuesday night that Mueller accused Barr of taking his report out of context when Barr presented a four-page summary of the document to Congress.
In a letter to Barr, Mueller wrote that the four-page letter presented to Congress that described the conclusions of the investigation “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the extensive investigation, according to The Washington Post.
