Attorney General Bill Barr sent Congress another letter on Friday updating lawmakers on the status of the Justice Department’s review of the Mueller report.
The letter states that the report is “nearly 400 pages” long, and that he expects to send a redacted version to lawmakers in mid-April.
In the letter, addressed to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Barr says that he is available to testify before the Senate on May 1, and before the House on May 2.
Barr writes in the letter that the report “sets forth the Special Counsel’s findings, his analysis, and the reasons for his conclusions.”
“Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own,” he writes.
Barr also says that his Sunday letter to Congress that provided his top-line conclusions of the report “was not, and did not purport to be, an exhaustive recounting of the Special Counsel’s investigation or report.”
“I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion,” he adds.
In a statement responding to Barr’s letter, Nadler said that “Congress must see the full report.”
“As I also informed him, rather than expend valuable time and resources trying to keep certain portions of this report from Congress, he should work with us to request a court order to release any and all grand jury information to the House Judiciary Committee-as has occurred in every similar investigation in the past,” Nadler said.
The attorney general wrote in a Sunday letter to Congress that Mueller did not establish that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia’s election interference during the 2016 election, but that the special counsel did not make a determination on the obstruction of justice allegations.
Since then, calls have mounted for the full report to be released. Nadler sent a request to Barr setting an April 2 deadline for the report’s delivery to the House.
But Barr’s Friday letter suggests that the process of redacting the report will take longer, providing detail on the work the Justice Department is undertaking with the special counsel to that end.
The review covers information protected by grand jury secrecy, sensitive intelligence information, information that could affect other ongoing investigations and, finally, information that could damage the reputations of “peripheral third parties” that weren’t charged in the Mueller investigation.
On the question of whether the White House will attempt to assert executive privilege over elements of the report, Barr writes that Trump “has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review.”
The question of whether Congress will have access to grand jury material — either that redacted in the report or underlying information gathered by the Mueller grand jury itself — remains vexing for Democrats, who could seek to invoke a Watergate-era precedent to access the information.
Tierney Sneed contributed reporting to this article.
Read the letter here:
