(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Robert Mueller, an unusually honorable and admirable law-enforcement official with a long history of public service, is preoccupied with letters.
In March, the former special counsel sent a plaintive note to Attorney General William Barr. He said Barr had publicly mischaracterized the conclusions that Mueller and his investigators had reached after a two-year probe of Russia’s efforts to sabotage the 2016 presidential election.
Barr “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office's work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. "There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations."
Mueller had reason to be miffed. After all, his probe wasn’t just an examination of whether contacts between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russians might’ve amounted to a criminal conspiracy (it didn’t, he concluded). He also probed Trump’s repeated efforts to obstruct justice by tampering with the investigation (and that, Mueller indicated, certainly seemed to have occurred). Yet when weighing the scales in his 448-page report, Mueller unhelpfully opted for a yeah-no-yeah-no perspective: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
What did Barr do with all that? As soon as Mueller dropped his report in the attorney general’s lap, Barr whipped up his own interpretation over a weekend before anyone else had a chance to read it. He then force-fed the nation his story of choice: In a four-page letter, Barr said that Trump didn’t conspire criminally and also didn’t obstruct justice. Mueller hadn’t exonerated the president or ruled on obstruction, Barr noted, so he decided to make those judgments himself. No conspiracy, no obstruction, case closed.
The media then helped Barr’s narrative along, as a mixture of journalists, Trump apologists and Russia sympathizers said a “reckoning” was afoot for anyone who had thought that the Mueller probe might’ve imperiled Trump’s presidency or implicated him in criminal acts. The report actually did demonstrate that the probe was an existential threat to Trump and was indisputably incriminating. But the reckoning crowd passed judgment with only Barr’s letter – and not the report – in hand.
You can imagine Mueller and his team being irked as they realized that Barr had just outflanked them. So what did Mueller do? He wrote his letter. Of course he did. He’s a profound institutionalist and a by-the-books prosecutor. Maybe he didn’t fully anticipate how rough-and-tumble Barr was prepared to be. Surely, a letter was the answer.
Nope, that letter rolled right off Barr’s back. “The letter’s a bit snitty” Barr told the Senate when he later testified about his handling of the special counsel’s report. Unlike Mueller, Barr wasn’t going to limit himself to gentlemanly missives about the finer points of law. When he unveiled his redacted version of the full report in April, he began the event with an unusual press briefing in which he simply reiterated Trump’s talking points.
“The special counsel found no ‘collusion’ by any American,” Barr said in a massively inappropriate display of political bravado. But Mueller hadn’t investigated collusion, which Barr knew full well. As Mueller noted in his report, his team “applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion.’"
None of that deterred Barr from spinning. “There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” he complained, stacking the deck against a report he had yet to release. “Apart from whether the acts were obstructive, this evidence of non-corrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the president had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.”
After this bit of dissembling, public interest in the report was deflated. By and large, most Americans and most politicians still haven’t read it. Now Democrats, hoping to reignite that interest, have asked Mueller to testify on Wednesday. He’s attending grudgingly. He’s also doing his thing with letters again. In what seems like a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome, he reportedly asked the Justice Department to write a letter to him this week suggesting that his testimony not stray beyond what’s in his report.
In all likelihood, then, Mueller will simply follow the rules and his sense of civic duty today and not say, for example, that he believes Trump obstructed justice. His rectitude, discipline and decency are all admirable. They’re also unfortunate qualities at the moment given that he’s surrounded by Barr, Trump and others whose sense of legal obligations is malleable and whose venality percolates right at the surface.
Barr has outmaneuvered Mueller at crucial junctures over the last several months. Ideally, Mueller would recognize that he has one last chance on Wednesday to be street smart and set the record straight for the public good. If he stays his course, he’s likely to wind up as just another person with good intentions who got body-slammed by a savvier political operative wearing a sheriff’s badge.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Timothy Lavin at tlavin1@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He has been an editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. His books include “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”
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