Attorney General Says He Can Release Mueller Report Within a Week

By Sadie Gurman and Byron Tau 

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday he will be able to deliver the special counsel's still-secret report to Congress within a week and vowed to explain his reasons for blacking out parts of the roughly 400-page document, a pledge that did little to mollify demands from Democrats for full access to the report.

"I am relying on my own discretion to make as much of it public as I can, " Mr. Barr said, adding that he will color-code the redactions and provide notes explaining the reasons for each.

His comments, a reiteration of his promise to release the edited report by mid-April, came during a hearing on the Justice Department's budget that was immediately overtaken by questions from Democrats about his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller's findings about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mr. Barr sought to keep the hearing focused on the priorities outlined in the Trump administration's $29.2 billion proposed budget for the Justice Department: fighting violent crime, enforcing immigration laws, battling drug abuse and countering national security threats.

Democrats have criticized his approach, saying they want to see the complete conclusions of the 22-month investigation and have threatened to issue a subpoena for the report in coming days if their demands aren't met. The matter could head to court, where judges have little precedent or guidance on how to decide whether Congress is entitled to certain types of secret information.

Two days after receiving Mr. Mueller's report, Mr. Barr released a four-page letter in which he summarized what he called the special counsel's main conclusions.

Mr. Barr wrote that Mr. Mueller's team didn't find that President Trump and his campaign had conspired or coordinated with Russia's interference in the 2016 election, but hadn't made a "traditional prosecutorial decision" on whether Mr. Trump had obstructed justice during the probe. In the absence of such a conclusion, Mr. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein determined that Mr. Trump's actions didn't meet the bar of a crime.

"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 at Tuesday's hearing. "Even for someone who has done this job before, I would argue it is more suspicious than impressive," she said, referring to Mr. Barr's tenure as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.

Mr. Barr shed no new light on why Mr. Mueller didn't make a recommendation about obstruction of justice, or why he made the determination on his own.

Democrats' concerns were heightened after reports last week that some investigators on Mr. Mueller's team had 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 initial summary.

Mr. Barr said Tuesday that he offered Mr. Mueller a chance to review the summary of his conclusions, but he declined. The special counsel's office had provided summaries of its findings to Mr. Barr but, according to the Justice Department, all them contained grand jury material that wouldn't be immediately releasable to the public.

"I suspect that they probably wanted more put out, but in my view, I was not interested in putting out summaries," Mr. Barr said. "Any summary, regardless of who prepares it, not only runs the risk of being underinclusive or overinclusive, but would trigger a lot of discussion and analysis that really should await everything coming out at once."

Mr. Barr noted that many of the regulations that Mr. Mueller operated under were developed after Democratic outrage about the handling of independent counsel Ken Starr's investigation into allegations that Bill Clinton committed impeachable offenses by lying about his affair with a White House intern.

"There was a lot of reaction against the publication of Ken Starr's report. And many of the people who are right now calling for the release of this report were basically castigating Ken Starr and others for releasing the Starr report," said Mr. Barr.

The Tuesday hearing was Mr. Barr's first public appearance since the report was delivered and could escalate what is expected to be a bitter and protracted political fight that is almost certain to land in the court.

Republicans characterized the standoff as a waste of time and a distraction.

"We've heard a lot about the Mueller report today. Twenty-two months of investigation, 2,800 s, $25 million from taxpayers, 500 witness interviews, 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents and who knows how many warrants -- and the conclusions are simple: no collusion, no obstruction," said Rep. Tom Graves, a Georgia Republican.

Mr. Barr has said he has been reviewing the report with Mr. 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.

He 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 earlier that he has no plans to share the report with the White House for a review of any confidential or privileged information. On Tuesday, though, he refused to say whether the Justice Department had briefed the White House about the report.

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.

It is the material Mr. Mueller gathered during grand jury proceedings -- documents as well as testimony -- that may lead to the greatest number of redactions in the report. By law, grand jury material is secret and in general can be released only with the permission of a judge.

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.

In previous investigations into presidential wrongdoing, special prosecutors received a judge's permission 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 District of Columbia Circuit, which would play a role in deciding whether Congress could gain access to the Mueller grand jury material if lawmakers 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 contributed to this article.

Write to Sadie Gurman at [e-mail] and Byron Tau at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 09, 2019 13:43 ET (17:43 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.