The celebration ended with Trump’s gentle good night.
“All right, kids. Thanks,” he said.
* * *
—
What Barr included in his summary of principal conclusions, what he left out, and how he framed the special counsel’s findings were the first and only words the public received that month about the probe’s long-awaited conclusion. Inside the bunker of Mueller’s lawyers, Barr’s letter stung. Members of the special counsel team would later describe Mueller’s reaction: He looked as if he’d been slapped.
Some team members were livid at what they considered Barr’s calculated and selective word choices that sidestepped the unpleasant evidence the team had uncovered about Trump himself and his campaign’s encouragement of the Russians. The team had made groundbreaking discoveries about Russian bots and intelligence officers rushing to hack Clinton’s personal emails hours after Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” remarks, yet that work was reduced to less than a sentence in Barr’s letter. Even the portion of the dependent clause in that sentence that Barr chose to make public put Trump in the most flattering light.
Quoting from the report, Barr wrote that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” He left out the thirty-nine preceding words from that passage, which confirmed the very facts Trump hated to acknowledge and refused to hear: “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
The authors of volume 2, who struggled to reveal every detail of Trump’s moves to shut down or curtail the criminal investigation, practically had steam coming out of their ears. Barr’s letter appeared to the uninformed reader to say the opposite of what they painstakingly laid out in their report. For example, Barr wrote that none of Trump’s actions, “in our judgment,” were done with corrupt intent. Actually, the report’s authors had detailed four episodes in which they identified substantial evidence of Trump’s intent to thwart the probe.
What had once been Trump’s defiant mantra of “No collusion! No obstruction!” instantly became a rallying cry for his reelection, lines he and his surrogates repeated on every media platform. Never mind what the Mueller team actually had found. Trump was winning the spin war.
Mueller had himself to blame for the misrepresentation of his work, in that he was a by-the-books creature of bureaucratic norms miscast for the Trump era, a period of profound polarization, fraying institutions, and news delivered like an IV to the public in fits and spurts.
“We’re the Twitter society,” said Frank Figliuzzi, a former Mueller colleague at the FBI. “We’re the digital streaming society. We’re the scan-the-headlines-to-get-some-news society. That’s not Mueller. That’s not a four-hundred-page report. Somebody’s got to show their face on a TV screen and scream and yell. What many of us have asked is, in the age of Trump, as steadfast as Mueller’s been to the principles of democracy that got us here, has Mueller served us well with this style? The answer is no.”
On the morning of March 25, less than twenty-four hours after Barr sent his summary letter, Zebley contacted O’Callaghan. He asked that the Justice Department release the executive summaries from each volume of Mueller’s report. O’Callaghan was noncommittal and said he, Barr, and Rosenstein would think about it. O’Callaghan asked Zebley to mark up the summaries for all necessary redactions of sensitive grand jury material and send them back.
Later that day, Zebley called O’Callaghan with a complaint. He said there was “public confusion” in the media reporting about Barr’s letter. When O’Callaghan briefed Barr on the call, the attorney general was taken aback and a bit peeved. As Barr saw it, he had written the letter to be intentionally brief and include only Mueller’s baseline conclusions, and as an act of good faith he quoted Mueller’s language about not being able to “exonerate” the president. What’s more, Barr told his team, they had given Mueller and his deputies an opportunity to review a draft of the letter and Zebley declined. How could Zebley now be upset about it?
On March 27, Mueller signed a letter to Barr from the special counsel’s office objecting strongly to the attorney general’s handling of the principal conclusions: “The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and its conclusions. We communicated that concern to the Department on the morning of March 25. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”
The letter said that the introductions and executive summaries of the report “accurately summarize this Office’s work and conclusions,” and included those redacted documents as attachments. “Release at this time would alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen and would answer congressional and public questions about the nature and outcome of our investigation.”
Barr’s office did not receive the letter until March 28. When they first read it, the attorney general and his team thought, “Holy shit! What is this? Give us a break.” To them, it was an uncharacteristically passive-aggressive move by Mueller. On April 30, the eve of Barr’s Senate testimony, the correspondence was reported by Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post. At his hearing the next day, Barr characterized the letter’s tone as “snitty” and speculated that it was written by one of Mueller’s underlings.
As he first absorbed the letter in private on March 28, Barr was pissed. He thought the letter was nasty. And he felt betrayed by his friend. “I’m calling Bob,” Barr told his staff. “We’ll work this out.” Mueller was out of the office getting a haircut that morning, but they connected later, shortly before lunchtime. Listening in from the Justice Department were Rosenstein, O’Callaghan, and Rabbitt.
“What the hell, Bob?” Barr asked. “What’s up with this letter? Why didn’t you pick up the phone and call me?”
Mueller replied by saying something along the lines of “We have concerns that certain issues were not given their full context. The executive summaries are the precise information necessary to reach the conclusion. There’s not something that’s absolutely wrong with your letter. The problem is misrepresentations in the media. We need to get something out soon that is more accurate, to clarify things.”
Despite his well-established lack of interest in public relations, Mueller zeroed in on the media coverage of his report. He said something along the lines of “We have concerns that our report is losing its impact because the full story’s not out there and the media’s not covering it the way we want them to.”