Former Attorney General Eric Holder argued in a Monday interview on MSNBC that Attorney General William Barr broke with precedent by refusing to share the full Mueller report with Congress.
MSNBC Host Ari Melber first compared special counsel Robert Mueller’s behavior with that of Leon Jaworski and Ken Starr, special counsels into former presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, respectively. (RELATED: Lichtman: Barr’s ‘Summary’ Of The Mueller Report Hardly Vindicates Trump)
“For your analysis, let’s look at the Nixon example, where the prosecutor Jaworski had a probe and did not offer a conclusion on obstruction, saying he would allow, quote, the house to determine what action was warranted. In the somewhat controversial Ken Starr example, he did not formally offer a conclusion on obstruction, noting it was not the role of his office to determine whether the president’s actions warrant impeachment. Is Barr through his letter violating those precedents?” Melber asked Holder.
“He is certainly departing from those precedents. It would seem to me that he is acting in a way that is inconsistent,” Holder responded. “It would seem asking in the way he did from Bob Mueller that attorney general Barr should have taken that information and packaged it in the appropriate form and sent it to the house for consideration.”
Barr received the Mueller report over the weekend and submitted a four-page letter to Congress advising them of the results. The attorney general revealed that no additional indictments would be made in the investigation and that there was no evidence to support the idea that President Donald Trump colluded with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential election.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein indicated in a February speech that he believed Barr would make the right decision. “I think Attorney General Barr is going to make the right decision. We can trust him to do that. He has a lot of experience with this,” Rosenstein said at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic International Studies.