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For reporters: some questions to ask Attorney General Barr at his inexplicable press conference.
1a) Why did you decide not to have Special Counsel Mueller speak at this press conference?
1a) Why did you decide not to have Special Counsel Mueller speak at this press conference?
1b) If a member of the Special Counsel’s Office wanted to hold a press conference or to testify before Congress, would you allow them to do so? If not, why not?
2a) Special Counsel Starr filed a motion to unseal grand jury materials in conjunction with his report to Congress. Why didn’t you file a similar motion?
2b) Did you ever discuss such a motion to unseal with the Special Counsel’s Office or with anyone at the White House?
2b) Did you ever discuss such a motion to unseal with the Special Counsel’s Office or with anyone at the White House?
3) You redacted information that might “unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.” Does that include anyone who has ever held a position in the federal government, the Trump Campaign, or the Trump Organization and, if so, who?
4) Did you work with the Special Counsel’s Office to determine what information should be redacted from Congress or from the public? If so, how many instances were there in which the Special Counsel’s Office disagreed with your decision to redact information?
5) You have redacted information related to ongoing investigations. When those investigations are concluded, will you provide Congress or the public with an updated copy of the report which removes those redactions?
6) Does the Special Counsel’s report include any recommendations to Congress and, if so, did you redact any of those?
7) After being confirmed as Attorney General, did you at any point discuss with the Special Counsel’s office the jurisdiction of his investigation and, if so, what did you say?
8) In your first briefing by the Special Counsel after you were confirmed as Attorney General, did the Special Counsel give you an estimate as to when their report would be concluded and, if so, what was that estimate?
9) Did you ever give the Special Counsel any timeline for when the investigation should be concluded?
10) Why did the Special Counsel conclude his investigation while subpoenas seeking evidence were still being litigated in the courts?
11) In June 2018, you sent the Department of Justice a 19-page memorandum on the Special Counsel’s obstruction of justice investigation. Are any of your opinions today different from the opinions you expressed in that memo?
Indeed. Barr was obviously chosen to scuttle the investigation and conceal the report: his qualifications were his Iran-Contra pardon history, his extreme views on executive privilege, his public statements against Mueller, and his unsolicited memo to DOJ.
But you can't ask someone like Barr that type of question. His answer is of course "no." Questions need to be factually discrete, with the type of specifics that make it difficult to lie in a way that won't be obvious if someone else contradicts him later.
