Media Run with "Bombshell" That Mueller Criticized Barr's Summary, But There's a Problem

Robert Mueller by DonkeyHotey, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

I’m not even sure why this matters given that the full report has been out for weeks now, but the media are never one to miss a gotcha and this is a juicy one. Or is it?

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The Washington Post (and The New York Times) are running with this supposed “bombshell” story.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

As you keep reading you see that Mueller’s primary complaint is apparently a “lack of context” with the findings on obstruction specifically.

This is petty nonsense. The letter was a summary. It was never meant to include all the context nor could it possibly do so. That’s what the 400 page report, which was released as promised a few weeks later is for. Barr was stuck in an impossible position. If he didn’t release a summary, he’d have been accused of hiding the bottom line findings while he sanitizes the report. Instead he released the bottom line findings and then got accused of misrepresenting the report (spoiler: he didn’t and we’ll see that admitted in a second).

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But there’s a problem with how the media are reporting this.

Buried in the Post report and absent from the headline is this pretty important line way down in the body.

“When Barr pressed him whether he thought Barr’s letter was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not, but felt that the media coverage of the letter was misinterpreting the investigation, officials said.”

In other words, Barr pushed back on Mueller’s silly complaints and got him to admit that Barr hadn’t misrepresented anything. Then we see Mueller fold and say he’s actually just upset with the media for misrepresenting the matter.

https://twitter.com/justkarl/status/1123370443132555265?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1123370443132555265&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fbrettt-3136%2F2019%2F04%2F30%2Fits-mueller-time-again-report-says-robert-mueller-wasnt-happy-with-ag-barrs-letter-but%2F

Barr doesn’t play games and that’s why he’s so good at his job. Could you imagine Jeff Sessions ever standing up to Mueller like that and calling him on his nonsense? Of course you couldn’t because he’d never do so.

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Meanwhile, the media talking heads on the left are reacting as expected.

That’s literally the opposite of what the Post report actually says, but MSNBC is gonna MSNBC.

Frankly, I’m kind of enjoying the freaking out at this point. These people are always in the process of losing their minds and it’s decent entertainment. Barr should continue to play hardball with Congress and tell the media to pound sand on their complaints.

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