In deep trouble

William Barr is in deep trouble

Analysis by Chris Cillizza

Attorney General William Barr did two strange things between the time he received special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and when he released it to Congress and the public.

The first came on March 24 when, two days after receiving the Mueller report, Barr released a four-page summary letter in which he made clear his conclusion that the report found no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians and that Mueller hadn't made any recommendation as to whether President Donald Trump should be charged with obstructing justice.

The second came on the morning of April 18 when Barr, with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein by his side, held a press conference to reiterate those findings -- in remarkably Trumpian language -- 90 minutes before actually making a redacted version of the report public.

On Tuesday night, those two moves came into far sharper -- and more troubling -- focus when it was revealed that Mueller sent a letter to Barr on March 27 expressing concern about the ways in which Barr's summary document described the evidence surrounding obstructive behavior. Mueller did not make issue with any of the factual statements in Barr's four-page letter but rather the lack of nuance on obstruction -- and the resultant media coverage, according to CNN's Laura Jarrett's reporting.

That revelation creates a series of problems for Barr -- most notably that he appeared to be, at best, misleading in his answers about Mueller's feelings about his summary of the report.

On April 9, in a House hearing, Barr seemed entirely unaware of Mueller's issues with his summary report. Here's the key exchange between Barr and Florida Democratic Rep. Charlie Crist:

CRIST: Reports have emerged recently, general, that members of the special counsel's team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24 letter, that it does not adequately or accurately portray the report's findings. Do you know what they are referencing with that?

BARR: No, I don't.

In an April 10 appearance before the Senate Appropriations Committee, this exchange happened between Barr and Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen:

VAN HOLLEN: Did -- did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?

BARR: I don't know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion.

What Barr quite clearly knew at that point -- and had known for the better part of two weeks -- was that Mueller had issues with the way in which he presented the conclusions of the report in the four-page letter.

Now, you can argue that Barr technically didn't lie there. He knew that Mueller wasn't thrilled with the way he summarized the broader report but that didn't mean that Mueller opposed the conclusions. Again, that is technically possible. But, in the real world, it sure as hell seems like Barr was purposely obfuscating when it came to Mueller's view of the report so as to downplay any sense that a) he didn't present a full picture of the report and b) there was any rift between the two men.

And, given all of what he knew about Mueller's opinion of his summary letter, Barr's decision to hold a press conference more than an hour before the release of the actual report is even more concerning.

At the time -- even without the knowledge we now possess about the Mueller letter of March 27 -- it seemed odd. The attorney general holding a press conference about a report that he had seen but no one in the media had been given -- and wouldn't be for another 90 minutes? It seemed, even before Barr began speaking, to be a relatively transparent attempt by the AG to frame the soon-arriving Mueller report -- to set the terms of the conversation for both Congress and the American public.

Within minutes, it became clear that was exactly Barr's intent. Here's just a piece of what Barr said that day:

"So that is the bottom line. After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the special counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes."

As I noted at the time, Barr's language was strikingly similar to how Trump himself had long described the Mueller probe. But, that language from Barr seems far more damning for the attorney general in light of what he knew about both the repeated incidents of seemingly obstructive behavior in the Mueller report and also Mueller's own concerns about the language Barr had used to describe the finding in his March 24 summary letter.

Barr is set to sit to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. He's got a lot to answer for.