Scrutiny of Attorney General William Barr's handling of the Mueller report could put his career on the line. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Legal Barr's legacy on the line as Mueller team fumes Legal experts and lawmakers say the attorney general is mishandling the special counsel's report.

William Barr is just seven weeks into his new job and he’s already in the middle of a gathering political storm over special counsel Robert Mueller’s 400-page report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

His career legacy could be on the line. This isn’t Barr’s first stint as attorney general, after all. And before returning to the Justice Department in February, he became an elite private lawyer and fixture of conservative legal circles. So many in Washington expected the 68-year-old former George H.W. Bush appointee to shore up a Justice Department reeling from the president’s verbal assaults on his own senior appointees, seasoned career federal prosecutors and FBI agents.


Barr inherited the Russia probe from his predecessor, Jeff Sessions. But his carefully built reputation is now at risk, legal experts and lawmakers in both parties say, as Mueller’s famously tight-lipped former prosecutors grouse to associates about how the attorney general has portrayed their work.

“He’s an institutionalist and loves the Department of Justice and the only thing he has to lose at this point in his career is his reputation,” former FBI director James Comey told CNN this week. Comey added that, for now, Barr “deserves the benefit of the doubt.”

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Some members of Congress are even asking whether Barr himself has broken the law, saying his characterization of the Mueller probe allowed Trump and his allies to build a public narrative clearing the president of any wrongdoing — all without actually releasing a full version of the special counsel’s findings.

“If it turns out that he has obstructed justice by how he has handled the Mueller report that will be a deep stain on his legacy,” said Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat and member of the House Judiciary Committee, who cautioned that Barr’s conduct is difficult to evaluate without seeing the full report.

Barr’s troubles started last month when he released the first in a series of three letters to Congress about the much-anticipated conclusions of the Mueller probe.

In the first statement, issued just after 5 p.m. on a Friday, Barr confirmed for lawmakers that the Russia investigation that had consumed Washington since the start of Trump’s presidency was indeed over and that he’d be spending the weekend working to release Mueller’s “principal conclusions.” A senior DOJ official also quickly confirmed that Mueller was not recommending any additional criminal indictments, bolstering the hopes of the president and his allies that the report would clear his name.

The next Barr disclosure came that Sunday night, in the form of a four-page letter declaring Mueller had not established there was a criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to meddle in the last presidential election. The attorney general further explained that Mueller took no position on whether Trump obstructed justice, though he quoted the special counsel as noting, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Barr pointedly noted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had appointed Mueller and long supervised his operation, agreed with his conclusion that the evidence Mueller had amassed wasn’t sufficient to charge Trump with an obstruction-of-justice crime.

Five days later, as Trump celebrated the Mueller findings as a “Total EXONERATION” clearing him from scandal, Barr weighed in again with a new two-page letter to Congress. This time, the attorney general outlined a fresh timetable for reviewing and redacting the entire 400-page report that put him on track to release it to lawmakers by mid-April “or sooner.”

Barr referenced the special counsel too, saying he was consulting with Mueller to identify and redact several categories of sensitive information. The attorney general also offered his first public recognition of the controversy he’d helped ignite by calling out “some media reports and other public statements mischaracterizing” his second letter as a “summary” of Mueller’s investigation. That letter wasn’t intended to be “an exhaustive recounting” of the special counsel’s work but only a synopsis of its “bottom line,” the attorney general wrote.

“Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own,” Barr added. “I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion.”

But the political damage might already have been done.

Greg Brower, the former head of FBI’s congressional affairs office, called it “ill-advised” for Barr to send the second letter offering up principal conclusions.

“It was just not an effective communication,” Brower said.

Barr only made things worse with his follow-up letter last Friday that seemed to walk back the idea that he’d just summarized Mueller’s main findings. “The third letter was intending to clean up the second and everyone was confused,” Brower said.

David Kris, a former assistant attorney general for national security under President Barack Obama, said Barr was in an impossible position when he first got Mueller’s findings and the pressure was building for some kind of an explanation for what had just been delivered.

“Had he not said anything, of course, he also would have been criticized,” said Kris, who now leads the intelligence consulting firm Culper Partners.

But Kris said Barr could still find himself in trouble if the release of the Mueller report shows that his March 24 letter was “materially misleading or contained material omissions.”

“And we don’t know that yet,” Kris cautioned.

Democrats this week have toggled between direct criticism of Barr and withholding judgment until they see the whole Mueller report.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff called it a “mistake” for the Senate to confirm Barr “without getting a commitment that he recuse himself.”

Johnson, the Georgia Democrat, said he’d give Barr “an F for his performance” to date, singling out the March 24 memo and its principal conclusions.

“That’s been the narrative since the summary came out, and it’s done a grave disservice to the American public,” he said.

Other Democrats said they were willing to give Barr room for a soft landing. “Yeah, I think if he produces the report and the supporting materials in its entirety, or with few exceptions, he can restore some faith that he’ll behave appropriate as the attorney general of the United States,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee.

But Cicilline also said Trump had put Barr in an untenable position with his extraordinary public criticism of Sessions, whom the president ripped as a weak leader who “never took control of the Justice Department.”

“The president has made it clear that he thinks the attorney general should be his Roy Cohn, someone whose principal responsibility is to protect him,” said Cicilline, referring to the former Sen. Joe McCarthy aide who later became Trump’s lawyer and mentor.

Some Democrats have been suspicious of Barr all along.

During his first tenure as attorney general, Barr criticized the underlying independent counsel statute and advised then-President George H.W. Bush to pardon half-a-dozen senior Reagan administration officials who had been ensnared in the Iran-Contra affair.

More recently, while serving in private practice at Kirkland & Ellis, Barr met with Trump in June 2017 but rebuffed his requests to personally represent the president on the Russia investigation.

A year later, Barr authored and widely circulated an unsolicited 19-page memo to Rosenstein explaining why he didn’t think Trump should be questioned or charged on the topic of obstruction of justice — the same issue he would later make a judgment on just days after Mueller formally turned in his report.

Democrats have since slammed the Barr memo as a job application, and outside observers agree it has called into question his decisions while serving as attorney general.

“That fact alone has confused things and muddied things up to the point there’s no way they’re going to be satisfied without hearing from Mueller,” Brower said, referring to the prospect of congressional testimony from the special counsel.

Democrats also note that Republicans close to Trump’s White House celebrated Barr’s arrival and suggested it would draw the Mueller investigation to its end.

“Tomorrow will be the first day that President Trump will have a fully operational confirmed Attorney General,” Matt Schlapp, the conservative activist and husband of White House communications adviser Mercedes Schlapp, tweeted in mid-February. “Let that sink in. Mueller will be gone soon.”

On Thursday, DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec defended Barr in the wake of media reports — first published in The New York Times — that some Mueller prosecutors were upset with the way the attorney general portrayed their work.

Every page of the confidential report Mueller gave Barr included a marking that it may contain material protecting grand jury information from public release, she said. “Given the extraordinary public interest in the matter, the attorney general decided to release the report’s bottom-line findings and his conclusions immediately — without attempting to summarize the report — with the understanding that the report itself would be released after the redaction process,” she said.

Kupec also repeated Barr’s statement to lawmakers that he doesn’t think the report should be released in “serial or piecemeal fashion.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a frequent Mueller critic and member of the Judiciary Committee, said the criticism leveled at Barr since he took the job is just Democrat-driven sour grapes.

“It strains credulity that the two-time attorney general of the United States would mischaracterize the Mueller report and risk his reputation in the legal community forever,” the Florida Republican said. “That is ludicrous to suggest, but Democrats are out of nonludicrous arguments to make.”

But George Terwilliger, who served under Barr as deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, said his former boss had “handled this exactly the way he said he would: aiming for maximum transparency but adhering to the requirements of the law, including the special counsel regulations.”

He also downplayed suggestions that Barr’s decisions on the release of the Mueller report would make or break his legacy. “It seems to me ‘career-defining’ probably overstates the circumstances a bit,” Terwilliger said. “It’s certainly important. But he’s faced and successfully dealt with I think challenges of equal and greater difficulty in the past.”

Another longtime associate, C. Boyden Gray, said the attorney general is likely to be a footnote in the Mueller story once the report is public.

“I don’t think at end of the day this as much a test of him as it is the system,” said Gray, who served as White House counsel for President George H.W. Bush.

As for Barr’s legacy, Gray added, “It’s really up to the press. They write the first rough draft of history.”

Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein contributed.