It’s not just that William Barr didn’t read the Mueller report’s underlying evidence. It’s worse.
At the start of today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Lindsey Graham made the surreal admission that he hadn’t even read the entire Mueller report, instead stating that he’d read “most” of it. This was terrible from an optics standpoint, considering he’s the chairman of today’s Mueller report hearing. But things took a stranger turn when Attorney General William Barr began telling us – not in exact words but nonetheless unmistakably – that he hasn’t read it either.
At one point Senator Ben Sasse launched into a monologue about Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. William Barr claimed he didn’t know who that was. That was a strange assertion, considering how heavily the Mueller probe focused on Paul Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska. Then at a later point another Senator brought up the assertion in the Mueller report that Manafort gave the Trump campaign’s internal data to alleged Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik. Barr acted genuinely surprised, as if he had no idea what the story even was.
At another point Senator Kamala Harris managed to get Barr to directly admit that he hadn’t reviewed the underlying evidence in the Mueller probe before he made a decision that Trump didn’t commit obstruction of justice. But these other moments about Manafort and Deripaska aren’t in the underlying evidence; they’re in the report itself, and they’ve also been in dozens of un-missable headlines from various major news outlets over the past months.
There are only a very small number of possibilities here. One is that Barr is doing a really good job of playing dumb about what’s in the Mueller report. The other is that he hasn’t read it. If it’s the former, it means Barr is being misleading to the point of perjuring himself. If it’s the latter, it means Barr wrote his four page summary of the Mueller report without even bothering to read any of the Mueller report, and that he still hasn’t read it.
We’re not sure which of these two scenarios is worse. Either way, today’s hearing is going terribly for William Barr, despite the efforts of the committee’s Republican majority to help him through it. At this rate, if Barr shows up for tomorrow’s House Judiciary Committee, he’s going to get eaten alive.
