House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., laid out their case Thursday against Attorney General William Barr over his handling of the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
“What we’ve learned today is that Attorney General Barr deliberately distorted significant portions of Special Counsel Mueller’s report,” they said in a joint statement. “Special Counsel Mueller’s report paints a disturbing picture of a president who has been weaving a web of deceit, lies and improper behavior and acting as if the law doesn’t apply to him. But if you hadn’t read the report and listened only to Mr. Barr, you wouldn’t have known any of that because Mr. Barr has been so misleading.”
Pelosi and Schumer then list four “significant” ways Barr obfuscated the truth about Mueller’s findings from his federal Russia investigation, including the weight the special counsel attributed the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion on whether a sitting president can be indicted or criminally prosecuted in deciding not to reach a conclusion regarding President Trump potentially obstructing justice. The pair also enumerated how Barr contradicted the report in his claims that Trump did not obstruct justice and that the president cooperated with the inquiry, while omitting that Trump campaign officials were aware of Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election.
“For these reasons, it is imperative that the rest of the report and the underlying documents be made available to Congress and that Special Counsel Mueller testify before both chambers as soon as possible,” Pelosi and Schumer said.
Pelosi and Schumer earlier Thursday had zeroed in on how the Mueller report “appears to undercut” Barr’s assertion that Trump did not obstruct justice during the probe. The speaker on Twitter additionally criticized the attorney general for his role in “the staggering partisan effort by the Trump Admin to spin public’s view” of the document.
The Democratic leadership’s statement comes as some members of their caucus, including 2020 presidential candidate Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, call for Barr to step down over his rollout of the report.
“He came to this job already biased. Today, he made a show of allegiance to the President over the American people by declaring ‘no collusion’ and excusing the President on the basis of his emotional state,” Swalwell said. “He has proved that he’s an embedded Trump ally who puts this President’s political future above of the rule of law. That makes him unfit to serve. He must resign.”
