By Sadie Gurman and Byron Tau
Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday he will be able to
release the special counsel's still-secret report within a week,
and vowed to be transparent about his reasons for blacking out
parts of the roughly 400-page document.
"I am relying on my own discretion to make as much of it public
as I can, " Mr. Barr said, adding that he said he would color-code
the redactions and provide notes explaining the reasoning for
each.
Lawmakers immediately pressed Mr. Barr about the report during a
hearing in which his testimony about the Justice Department's
budget could be overshadowed by questions about his plans to
release the edited document.
"We cannot hold this hearing without mentioning the elephant in
the room, " Rep. José Serrano (D., N.Y.), said, opening the hearing
before the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday. "The American
people have been left with many unanswered questions; serious
concerns about the process by which you formulated your letter; and
uncertainty about when we can expect to see the full report."
Mr. Barr has said he would make the document, with redactions,
public by mid-April, but Democrats have called that insufficient.
They want to see the complete conclusions of Robert Mueller's
22-month investigation, and have threatened to issue a subpoena for
the report in the coming days if their demands aren't met.
Democrats' concerns were heightened after reports last week that
some investigators on Mr. Mueller's team have told associates in
recent days that they believe the report is more critical of Mr.
Trump on the issue of whether he obstructed justice than Mr. Barr
indicated in his summary.
Mr. Barr said Tuesday that he offered Mr. Mueller a chance to
review the summary of his conclusions, but he declined.
The Tuesday hearing was Mr. Barr's first public appearance since
the report was delivered and has the potential to escalate what is
expected to be a bitter and protracted political fight that is
almost certain to land in the courts.
Mr. Barr offered few additional clues about what the full report
contains. Instead, his own testimony stuck to the priorities
outlined in the Trump administration's $29.2 billion proposed
budget for the Justice Department: fighting violent crime,
immigration enforcement, the nation's drug abuse crisis and
national security threats.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.)
suggested that he could call the committee into session during a
two-week congressional recess if Mr. Barr redacts too much of the
report by Mr. Mueller or withholds underlying documentation.
"We'll have to take a look at it; take a look at what we get,"
Mr. Nadler said. "We'll make determinations as to whether we should
call the committee into session before we come back or whether we
should simply issue the subpoenas or whether what we have gotten is
sufficient."
"The timing isn't the question," Mr. Nadler said. "What is the
question is what we receive."
Even as he was preparing for his testimony, Mr. Barr has been
reviewing the report with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein,
their top aides and a member of Mr. Mueller's team, and blacking
out grand jury material, classified information and other
information to protect the privacy of individuals not charged with
a crime.
Mr. Barr is under intense pressure to produce the edited report
quickly amid concerns from Democrats that the attorney general, a
longtime advocate of executive-branch authority, will seek to
protect the president from politically damaging information the
report may contain.
Mr. Barr has sought to allay those fears, saying, among other
things, that he has no plans to share the report with the White
House for a review of any confidential or privileged
information.
Last month, two days after he received the document from Mr.
Mueller, Mr. Barr released a four-page letter in which he
summarized the special counsel's conclusions.
Mr. Barr said Mr. Mueller's team didn't find that President
Trump and his campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia in its
interference in the 2016 election, but hadn't made a "traditional
prosecutorial decision" on whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice
during the probe. In the absence of such a conclusion, Messrs. Barr
and Rosenstein determined that Mr. Trump's actions didn't meet the
bar of a crime.
Democrats and some Republicans say those decisions underscore
the need for Mr. Barr to make the entire report public. Their
concerns were heightened after reports last week that some
investigators on Mr. Mueller's team have told associates in recent
days that they believe the report is more critical of Mr. Trump on
the issue of whether he obstructed justice than Mr. Barr indicated
in his summary.
"It is extraordinary to evaluate hundreds of pages of evidence,
legal documents, and findings based on a 22-month long inquiry and
make definitive legal conclusions in less than 48 hours," House
Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D., N.Y.) said in
prepared remarks released Monday. "Even for someone who has done
this job before, I would argue it is more suspicious than
impressive."
The Justice Department defended its handling of the report,
saying Mr. Barr decided to release only the report's main findings
initially, given the public interest, with the understanding that
he would release the full, redacted document after reviewing
it.
In the House, now led by Democrats, the Judiciary Committee
authorized subpoenas for the report last week, and the chairman of
that panel said he could issue them in the coming days if the
Justice Department doesn't meet the committee's demands.
Mr. Mueller's use of a grand jury has complicated efforts to
make the report public. By law, information gathered in the course
of grand jury proceedings is secret and can generally only be
released with the permission of a judge.
Congressional access to grand jury material is even more
complicated. Few courts have grappled with the question of whether
Congress is entitled to such material and under what circumstances,
meaning there is little precedent for how courts would interpret
such a subpoena from Congress.
In previous investigations into presidential wrongdoing, special
prosecutors got permission from a judge to use material related to
grand jury matters in reports to either Congress or the public. The
Justice Department hasn't done so in this case, despite the request
from congressional Democrats.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which would play
a role in deciding whether Congress could gain access to the
Mueller grand jury material if Congress went to court to seek it,
said last week in an unrelated case that judges have no inherent
authority to release grand jury evidence to individuals seeking the
information.
An earlier opinion, which the panel of judges didn't dispute in
its April 5 ruling, allowed Congress to obtain such information
only in the context of an impeachment proceeding.
--Aruna Viswanatha and Siobhan Hughes contributed to this
article.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com and Byron Tau at
byron.tau@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 09, 2019 10:49 ET (14:49 GMT)
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