Attorney General William Barr said that Presidential Donald Trump did not influence any of the redactions in the report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Barr’s office received the unredacted report from Mueller and made redactions based on the law, including protecting personal information about the grand jury involved in the process.
Barr said that the White House received a redacted copy of the report and reviewed it. Trump then chose not to assert executive privilege despite substantial evidence showing the president was upset and frustrated at the investigation, which ultimately uncovered no links between Trump or his campaign and Russian actors seeking to influence the 2016 elections.
“Trump could have asserted privilege and he would have been well within his rights to do so,” Barr said during an April 18 press conference preceding the public release of the report.
Additionally, the president instructed his administration to cooperate with Mueller and the special counsel’s team. “The President took no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation,” Barr said. “This evidence of noncorrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.”
Barr noted that Mueller found evidence indicating three separate strands of Russian interference, but none of them involved the assistance of any Americans.
“We now know that the Russian operatives who perpetrated these schemes did not have the cooperation of President Trump or the Trump campaign—or the knowing assistance of any other Americans for that matter,” Barr said.
“In other words, there was no evidence of Trump campaign ‘collusion’ with the Russian government’s hacking,” he said.
“So that is the bottom line. After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the Special Counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes.”
Barr said that the situation was unprecedented.
He praised Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller as special counsel, in addition to Mueller himself for “the thoroughness of his investigation, particularly his work exposing the nature of Russia’s attempts to interfere in our electoral process.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2019
Barr said that he chose to disseminate the report to members of Congress and that it would be posted on the Department of Justice website for the public to read. “I am committed to ensuring the greatest possible degree of transparency concerning the Special Counsel’s investigation, consistent with the law,” he said.
Trump reacted to the press conference by posting a Game of Thrones-themed picture showing him standing amid smoke, with large letters reading: “Game Over.”
“No collusion, no obstruction. For the hater and the radical left Democrats—Game Over,” it read.
