Debate with Barr over obstruction may have helped bring Mueller’s probe to an end: Report

A legal dispute between Attorney General William Barr and Robert Mueller may have helped bring the special counsel’s investigation to an end.

Conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain speculated in a recent appearance on One America News Network that Trump’s legal team may have sought Barr’s help to counter Mueller’s reckless interpretation of the law on obstruction of justice, paving the way for the nearly two-year investigation to come to a close.

The conclusion of Mueller’s investigation with no evidence whatsoever of collusion has fueled speculation that Mueller came up empty on the conspiracy part of the probe long before the investigation ended. If that’s true, then it was the obstruction part of the investigation that kept the probe going.

Theory: Barr helped end Mueller probe

It was known before the release of Mueller’s report last Thursday that Mueller and Barr had conflicting views on obstruction. In June 2018, Barr wrote a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein criticizing Mueller’s “fatally misconceived” interpretation of obstruction of justice, which included Trump’s tweets and his firing of James Comey — an act that falls within the president’s constitutional authority — as examples of obstructive acts.

That letter was written as Mueller was seeking an interview with Trump, which Barr argued would have been unjustified given Mueller’s wrongfully broad interpretation of obstruction. This led Chamberlain to speculate that the letter was part of a strategy by Trump’s lawyers to bring an end to the obstruction probe; unable to convince Mueller themselves, Trump’s lawyers asked Barr to write a letter to Rosenstein to convince him that the special counsel’s obstruction theory was wrong.

“Because of the impasse that Trump’s lawyers were at with Mueller and [Andrew] Weissman, they tried to…convince Rosenstein that the obstruction theory that Mueller and Weissman were using was legally unsound,” Chamberlain said. “My theory is they went to Bill Barr and said, ‘Bill, you’re a former [attorney general], you have credibility with Rosenstein. Why don’t you write a letter to Rosenstein to persuade him that the Mueller-Weissman theory is wrong?'”

Chamberlain said that Barr’s June 2018 letter indicates he “had inside information about Mueller’s theory of obstruction,” and that it was likely no coincidence that Barr was nominated and swiftly confirmed after Jeff Sessions’ post-midterms ouster.

Chamberlain also noted that Mueller’s report reveals Barr and Mueller engaged in a dense legal back-and-forth on obstruction, lending credence to the theory that Barr may have pushed to end the investigation.

Watch below:

Barr comes out on top

At a Thursday press conference on the Mueller report, Barr admitted that he “disagreed” with some of Mueller’s legal theories on obstruction. In the report, Mueller’s team laid out their theory that “corrupt conduct, other than document destruction, that has the natural tendency to obstruct contemplated as well as pending proceedings” could be construed as obstruction.

But in his June 2018 letter, Barr argued that obstruction should be limited to acts like destroying evidence and witness tampering — not angry tweets venting frustration about being investigated.

Still, while the two had their dispute, Mueller is Barr’s subordinate. The expiration of a 1999 independent counsel law means that Barr has full authority over special counsel investigations — so despite his objections to Barr’s theory, Mueller may ultimately have deferred to Barr’s discretion.

Indeed, in his report, Mueller laid out numerous instances of what he considered potential obstruction but ultimately decided to neither charge Trump nor exonerate him. Democrats have pointed to Mueller’s ambiguous decision, and his citation of a long-standing precedent that a sitting president cannot be indicted, to argue that Mueller would have charged Trump with obstruction had he not been the president.

Some have even suggested that Mueller thought his job was not so much to look for crimes as to engage in a fact-finding mission — prepare a “roadmap” — for Congress to potentially impeach the president. But at his press conference, Barr pushed back against these talking points, saying he understood Mueller to have deferred to him.

“[Mueller] made it very clear, several times, that he was not taking a position — he was not saying but for the OLC opinion [that presidents can’t be indicted] he would have found a crime,” Barr said. He went on:

[Mueller] did not indicate that his purpose was to leave the decision to Congress… I hope that was not his view, since we don’t convene grand juries and conduct criminal investigations for that purpose.

I didn’t talk to him directly about the fact that we were making the decision, but I am told that his reaction to that was that it was my prerogative as attorney general to make that decision.

Invoking his authority as attorney general, Barr decided that the president did not obstruct justice — and that’s that.