The attorney general misled the public
Benjamin Wittes
Editor in chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
... Not in my memory has a sitting attorney general more diminished the credibility of his department on any subject ...
The dishonesty only begins with the laughably selective quotation of Muellers report in Barrs original letter, the scope of which Charlie Savage laid out in a remarkable New York Times article shortly after the full report was released. I urge people to look at Savages side-by-side quotations. The distortion of Muellers meaning across a range of areas is not subtle, and its not hard to understand why Mueller himself wrote to Barr saying that the attorney generals letter did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Offices work and conclusions ...
Barrs public statements on the report reflect at least seven different layers of substantive misrepresentation, layers which build on one another into a dramatic rewriting of the presidents conductand of Muellers findings about the presidents conduct. It is worth unpacking and disentangling these misrepresentations, because each is mischievous on its own, but together they operate as a disinformation campaign being run by the senior leadership of the Justice Department.
The first element is Barrs repeated conflation of that which Mueller has deemed to be not provable to the exacting standards of criminal law with that which is not true at all or for which there is no evidence. Mueller determined that the evidence did not establish Trump-campaign participation in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller also makes clear that when his report describes that the investigation did not establish particular facts, this does not mean there was no evidence of those facts ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/bill-barrs-performance-was-catastrophic/588574/