office, but he could have reached a decision as to whether it was criminal activity, but he had his reasons for not doing it, which he explained, and i m not going to argue about those reasons. just think through barr s claim right there. he s saying he would prefer that bob mueller conclude that donald trump committed criminal activity on obstruction without indicting him. how can i say this nicely. that s very hard to believe. and also, if that is what barr preferred and demanded, he could have demanded it. barr was mueller s boss until yesterday. he could order mueller to update the report with that very decision if he wanted. he didn t. he made the decision for himself. but when he didn t make a decision, the deputy attorney general, rod rosenstein, and i felt it was necessary for us as the heads of the department to reach that decision. well, he seemed to suggest yesterday that there was another
and trump, the infamous summaries and letters that mr. barr designed for not only a legal audience or court or congress, but designed to drive tweets and tv chirons and headlines to define the mueller report not only before it would be read, this is vital, to define the mueller report instead of it being read. barr got his results working on trump s vision to dominate this buzzy world where people don t even finish articles, let alone government reports. did that work? is it useful at this juncture to understand how this system was worked? how barr maybe outworked mueller? even for those who wish barr was not as effective as he is? consider that as all this news was breaking, just hours after mueller spoke, we got historical perspective by john meacham
about how mueller s tools may have been outgunned. a point we discussed. mueller and his team are in a knife fight and barr and trump brought a gun to that knife fight. one of his points this morning is read what we said. and fewer people do that. let me build on your point and hand it back to you, because you put it very well. and another way to say it is bob mueller brought a book to a twitter fight yes. now, that backdrop helps explain why a citizen who was interested enough to attend a town hall in person, which is something actually we know from data most people never do, was still surprised that the mueller report had anything bad on trump in it. i want to show you this brief, interesting, and honest exchange from a voter at a town hall with the lone republican congressman to say trump committed impeachable offenses. i was surprised there was anything negative in the mueller
comes from the meat, in this case mueller. but team trump figured out a way to blunt what they may view as the bitter taste of mueller s meaty evidence by sandwiching him with a lot of barr. if you remember, there was a lot of barr before any of the mueller report came out. there was more barr during that unusual press conference to upstage the report on the very day it came out. and now that bob mueller has spoken for what he says he hopes to be the last time, well, guess what, mueller sandwich. barr out today again muddying mueller s careful explanation of how the rules prohibit indicting a president because, true to the sandwich, barr is making his own news and he is the attorney general, so what he says matters. he is claiming that mueller could have reached a decision on that very indictment point. i personally felt he could have reached a decision. in your view he could have reached a conclusion. right. he could have reached a conclusion. the opinion says you can t indict a
disagreed with barr about that and yesterday he clearly tried to steer clear of that. he tried to steer clear of it because he s a man of integrity and hyperfocused on his mission. that s one thing that you can take away from his comments yesterday related to the fact that you can not indict a president. of course i was not going down that route. i think that barr nor trump don t know what to do with that. they don t know what to do with a person who operates with that degree of integrity. so you had trump going on multiple rants today, tweeting up a storm, distracting from his failures as a leader but working actively to mislead the american people. thanks to each of you for kicking off our coverage. we have a lot more to get to. we ll go inside mueller s end game strategy as well as why he is concerned that you may not have read the full report yet. we ll get into that and i ll speak to rob reiner who s working right here with robert de niro on this new impeachment push. in the