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Former Attorney General Bill Barr was highly critical of the Russia investigation that took place before and during the Trump administration, and he had some choice words directed toward former special counsel Robert Mueller in a new tell-all book set to come out later this month.
In the book, titled “One Damn Thing After Another,” Barr said it was “a controversial move” for then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Mueller as a special counsel with “some measure of independence” in the first place. Rosenstein had been acting attorney general for the purposes of the investigation due to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal.
“I believe Rosenstein felt that the collusion allegations were probably baseless and that the best way for the administration to get beyond the wild scandalmongering was to appoint a prominent figure who could bring things to a conclusion quickly and credibly,” Barr wrote. He went on to say that one problem was that Mueller failed to look into how and why the FBI began the investigation in the first place despite it already being “a bust” by the time he got involved.
Attorney General William Barr speaks during a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, Dec. 21, 2020. (Michael Reynolds/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Another problem, Barr said, was that with Mueller’s existing ties to the FBI and those who led the probe first known as Crossfire Hurricane, “he was the wrong person to investigate it anyway.”
Barr pointed out that Mueller was brought in to take over a probe that began as a counterintelligence investigation, only for him and his team to turn it into “a heavy-handed criminal investigation.”
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“But he never seemed to have stopped to examine whether there was an adequate basis for pursuing either a counterintelligence or criminal investigation,” Barr wrote. He went on to cite an FBI agent who was on Mueller’s team as saying that “after Mueller came in, the office quickly developed a ‘Get Trump’ attitude and began with a preexisting conviction that there must be ‘something criminal.'”
In this May 29, 2019, file photo, special counsel Robert Mueller speaks at the Department of Justice in Washington about the Russia investigation. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
Barr, who became attorney general in the middle of Mueller’s investigation, also criticized the “dunderheaded” decision to staff Mueller’s office with mostly Democrats.
“The whole purpose of appointing Mueller was to assure the public that partisanship would not be involved in the investigation,” Barr wrote. “Mueller defeated the very purpose of his appointment. His staffing decisions engendered deep distrust in half the country. Based on later information about the way the investigation was conducted, those fears were not wholly unjustified.”
Barr also accused Mueller’s investigation of having a “glaring omission” in not looking into whether information from Christopher Steele’s dossier that was a key part of the probe “was Russian disinformation intended to sow chaos during the election and afterward.”
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It was eventually learned that the information in the dossier was never verified, but the FBI relied on it anyway before Mueller got involved.
“Even though Mueller was supposed to investigate Russian efforts to interfere in the election, he never seemed to have explored the possibility that Steele’s dossier was used as a vector for Russian disinformation,” Barr wrote.