On the day after the redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was released to the public, White House lawyer Emmet Flood wrote to Attorney General William Barr to “memorialize concerns” related to the probe, including a frustration that Mueller didn’t make a decision on whether President Trump obstructed justice.
“In closing its investigation, the SCO (special counsel’s office) had only one job — to ‘provide the attorney general with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the special counsel,'” he wrote in the letter obtained by CNN. “Yet the one thing the SCO was obligated to do is the very thing the SCO — intentionally and unapologetically — refused to do.”
Flood also complained about Mueller’s team making “political” statements, like concluding it couldn’t reach a decision on obstruction nor exonerate President Trump and going beyond the scope of what the office was supposed to probe.
“In the American justice system, innocence is presumed, there is no ‘need’ for prosecutors to ‘conclusively determine’ it,” he said. “The special counsel and his staff failed in their duty to act as prosecutors and only as prosecutors.”
Read the letter via CNN here.
