Attorney General Says He Can Release Mueller Report Within a Week

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 [e-mail] and Byron Tau at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 09, 2019 10:49 ET (14:49 GMT)

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