PerspectiveJudge Rebukes Barr’s Handling of Mueller Report

Published 6 March 2020

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton Thursday sharply criticized the way Attorney General William Barr handled the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report, saying Barr had made “misleading public statements” to spin the investigation’s findings in favor of President Donald Trump. AP reports that the scolding from the judge was unusually blunt, with the judge saying that “he struggled to reconcile Barr’s public characterizations of the report — which included his statement that Mueller found ‘no collusion’ between the Trump campaign and Russia — with what the document actually said.”

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton Thursday sharply criticized the way Attorney General William Barr handled the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report, saying Barr had made “misleading public statements” to spin the investigation’s findings in favor of President Donald Trump.

AP reports that Walton, saying Barr had shown a “lack of candor,” delivered the criticism in a 23-page order in which he directed the Justice Department to give him an unredacted version of the Mueller report so that he could decide whether the redactions were made in good faith, and whether any additional information from the document could be publicly disclosed.

AP continues:

The scolding from the judge was unusually blunt, with Walton saying Barr appeared to make a “calculated attempt” to influence public debate about the report in ways favorable to the president. The rebuke tapped into lingering criticism of Barr, from Democrats in Congress and Mueller himself, that he had misrepresented some of the most damning findings from the two-year investigation.

In his ruling, Walton said he needed to review the entire document itself because he could not trust that the Justice Department’s redactions of the report were made properly and in good faith. The judge said it would be disingenuous of him to presume the redactions were “not tainted by Attorney General Barr’s actions and representations” throughout the process.

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The judge said he struggled to reconcile Barr’s public characterizations of the report — which included his statement that Mueller found “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia — with what the document actually said.

Those inconsistencies, Walton wrote, “cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.”