It did not take long for President Trump to revive a fight with one of his favorite targets, the New York Times.
The New York Times released a late-night report showing some members of the Mueller team were pushing back against the Barr summary.
Trump surely saw the story first thing this morning, as he immediately sent out a scathing tweet calling the publication “Fake News.”
The New York Times had no legitimate sources, which would be totally illegal, concerning the Mueller Report. In fact, they probably had no sources at all! They are a Fake News paper who have already been forced to apologize for their incorrect and very bad reporting on me!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 4, 2019
The Pushback
The NYT cites several unnamed sources on the Mueller team that were not happy with the Barr summary given to Congress last weekend.
The team members felt as though Barr mischaracterized the evidence regarding obstruction of justice.
They stated there was “acute” evidence of obstruction, whereas as Barr stated Mueller did not believe there was enough evidence during the investigation to warrant obstruction charges.
This sounds as though it is more about semantics than anything else.
It also appears as though a publication that has been feuding with Donald Trump for more than three years is putting out a story to continue to give the Democrats something to feed on.
Frustrations Mounting
In addition to the President pushing back, Attorney General Barr and the Justice Department are less than thrilled with the grandstanding by Democrats in Congress.
Barr has already told them they will get the report as soon as it is ready, but that has not satisfied the Democrats.
Led by Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Democrats filed authorizations for subpoenas for the full, unredacted report.
This appears to be yet more grandstanding, though, as Barr is under no obligation to give them anything.
In fact, several Republican lawmakers have already defended Barr as well as stating Congress may not be entitled to see all the documentation they are requesting.
The Justice Department also released a statement addressing this issue to Fox News:
“Every page of the ‘confidential report’ provided to Attorney General Barr on March 22, 2019 was marked ‘May Contain Material Protected Under Fed. R. Crim. P. 6(e)’ – a law that protects confidential grand jury information – and therefore could not be publicly released.
“Given the extraordinary public interest in the matter, the Attorney General decided to release the report’s bottom-line findings and his conclusions immediately — without attempting to summarize the report — with the understanding that the report itself would be released after the redaction process.
“As the Attorney General stated in his March 29th letter to Chairman Graham and Chairman Nadler, he does not believe the report should be released in ‘serial or piecemeal fashion.’ The Department continues to work with the Special Counsel on appropriate redactions to the report so that it can be released to Congress and the public.”
The sad thing here is Nadler and his fellow Democrats are very much aware of these laws.
As I have stated before, this is not politics but rather political theater, and it is reprehensible to waste taxpayer time and money on this ridiculous quest to oust Trump from office by any means possible.
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