As Democratic lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee have called on Robert Mueller to testify before them as soon as May 15, President Trumps says that the Special Counsel should not testify, because Democrats are not entitled to a “do over.”
In a scathing tweet the president said, “After spending more than $35,000,000 over a two year period, interviewing 500 people, using 18 Trump Hating Angry Democrats & 49 FBI Agents – all culminating in a more than 400 page Report showing NO COLLUSION – why would the Democrats in Congress now need Robert Mueller to testify.”
Trump continued, “Are they looking for a redo because they hated seeing the strong NO COLLUSION conclusion? There was no crime, except on the other side (incredibly not covered in the Report), and NO OBSTRUCTION. Bob Mueller should not testify. No redos for the Dems!”
The request for Mueller to testify is to supposedly clarify what exactly he objected to in Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of the report. We now know that Mueller wrote Barr a letter objecting to that summary. House Democrats say that Mueller was upset with the way Barr summarized the “principal conclusions” of his report in his four-page memo. Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee saying that what Mueller objected to was not the content of his memo, but the way the media was positioning it.
Barr refused to testify before the House Committee, and may be held in contempt of Congress for doing so.
Issues With the Barr Memo
Barr’s four-page memo detailed 10 episodes that Democrats have argued amount to obstruction of justice by Donald Trump. But in his March 24 summary, Barr stated that Mueller’s investigation found no conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia, and that he, along with then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, concluded that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”
Mueller’s letter of March 27 apparently said that the memo “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions.” Mueller and Barr apparently further discussed the special counsel’s objections via phone, and Barr says it was in that phone call that Mueller explained that his objections were more about the media coverage of his summation, than the context of the four-page memo.
Meanwhile, the battle between congressional Democrats and the Justice Department over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report has reached new levels of vitriol, as some on the left are calling for Attorney General Bill Barr to be physically dragged in to testify or even locked up for defying congressional subpoenas.
House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., over the weekend urged the panel to specifically pursue “inherent contempt,” calling for Barr to be arrested by the Sergeant at Arms and be physically brought before the committee to testify—a tactic reportedly not employed since the 1930s.
