Attorney General Bill Barr admitted that he overruled special counsel Bob Mueller in presenting the Mueller report’s findings on President Donald Trump’s attempts to obstruct the Russia investigation.
Barr told CBS News that he disagreed with Mueller’s analysis of Trump’s acts to impede the probe and determined that the findings “would not amount to obstruction” even though Mueller explicitly and repeatedly stated that if his team were confident the president “didn’t commit a crime” they “would have said so.”
“We didn't agree with the legal analysis, a lot of the legal analysis in the report. It did not reflect the views of the department," Barr said. "It was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers and so we applied what we thought was the right law."
That’s the opposite of what Barr told Congress:
Barr’s statement to CBS completely contradicts what he told Congress earlier this month.
“We accepted the special counsel's legal framework for purposes of our analysis and evaluated the evidence as presented by the special counsel in reaching our conclusions,” Barr told a Senate committee.
Barr dismisses critics: “Everyone dies”
Barr was asked in the interview whether he worried that his whitewashing of the Mueller report to help Trump would hurt his legacy.
“I am at the end of my career,” Barr said. “Everyone dies, and I am not, you know, I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?”
