Barr Letter Mueller Quotes

We offered you the opportunity to look at the letter and you said no. We’re flabbergasted here.” “Your summary letter fails to put into context the decisions we made,” Mueller said. At this point, Zebley jumped in. He had no problems with Barr’s description of their Russian interference work and said nothing about it. “It’s all about obstruction. Your letter doesn’t give enough context as to our thinking about the OLC opinion and the media coverage is misleading about that.” Barr again defended his letter. “We weren’t trying to summarize. We weren’t trying to put in context. We were just trying to state your conclusions,” he told Mueller and Zebley.

Barr decided to write a second letter to Congress, which would detail the special counsel’s principal conclusions. He and his team scanned the Mueller report looking for sentences that they could quote in the letter that summarized the special counsel’s findings or reflected the bottom line. They found the report to be a garbled mess and struggled to find something worth quoting. At one point, O’Callaghan homed in on this line: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” “If we don’t include that, people are going to criticize us,” O’Callaghan said. Barr agreed. “You know what, Ed? That’s a good point. Let’s put that in there,” he said. As they finalized the draft of the letter, O’Callaghan called Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s chief of staff. He told Zebley that Barr would be laying out Mueller’s bottom-line conclusions and asked if he would want to read the draft before it was released. Zebley responded no, telling O’Callaghan that they did not need to see it. Zebley was hoping and assuming that Barr’s letter would quote the summaries the team had spent so much time on. But he didn’t say that to O’Callaghan. Yet again, the Mueller team declined an opportunity to weigh in on how their investigation’s findings would be presented to the public.

As Barr saw it, he had written the letter to be intentionally brief and include only Mueller’s baseline conclusions, and as an act of good faith he quoted Mueller’s language about not being able to “exonerate” the president. What’s more, Barr told his team, they had given Mueller and his deputies an opportunity to review a draft of the letter and Zebley declined. How could Zebley now be upset about it? On March 27, Mueller signed a letter to Barr from the special counsel’s office objecting strongly to the attorney general’s handling of the principal conclusions: “The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and its conclusions.