Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday shed more light on his interactions with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, less than 24 hours after a news report revealed – and the Justice Department confirmed – that Mueller in March objected to Barr's characterization of the special counsel's findings.

Barr, in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that he and the Justice Department's No. 2 official, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, met with Mueller as early as March 5 to discuss the findings of the special counsel's probe, which was nearing its conclusion after nearly two years.

Mueller had been tapped to probe Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, potential collusion between the Kremlin and President Donald Trump's campaign, and possible obstruction of justice by the president.

At the March 5 meeting, Mueller indicated that he and his team of more than a dozen prosecutors would not bring charges against the president for obstruction – but they wouldn't exonerate him.

"We were frankly surprised that they were not going to reach a decision on obstruction, and we asked them a lot on the reasoning behind this and the basis for this," Barr testified. "We did not understand exactly why the special counsel was not reaching a decision, and when we pressed him on it, he said that his team was still formulating the explanation."

Mueller submitted his report March 22. Barr testified that he had asked Mueller to flag portions of the report that included secret grand jury material, and which therefore might require redactions. The attorney general said that Mueller did not do so, prompting a delay in the report's release – and a crucial factor in Barr's decision to release a letter describing the report's main findings.

"Unfortunately it did not come in that form, and it quickly became apparent that it would take three to four weeks to identify that material and other material that would need to be redacted," Barr testified.

He continued: "When the report came in on the 22nd and we saw that it was going to take a great deal of time to get it out to the public, I made the determination that we had to put out some information about the bottom line. The body politic was in a high state of agitation, there was a lot of interest in what the bottom-line results of Bob Mueller's report was."

Barr compared his summary to "announcing after an extended trial what the verdict of the trial is pending the release of the full transcript."

He added that he had offered Mueller an opportunity to review his summary, but that the special counsel declined. Barr, in his summary to congressional leaders March 24, would go on to quote a sentence fragment from Mueller's report: that "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

Mueller in his report, however, cited several legal and policy reasons why his office chose not to bring obstruction charges, including an Office of Legal Counsel opinion that "the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions."

The special counsel, in the report, added that if it "had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment." The detail was not mentioned in Barr's letter.

Barr, in his testimony to the Senate panel, said that the Office of Legal Counsel's opinion came up in his March 5 meeting with Mueller: "Special Counsel Mueller stated three times to us in that meeting, in response to our questioning, that he emphatically was not saying, but-for the OLC opinion, he would've found obstruction," Barr testified. "He said that in the future, the facts of the case against the president might be such that the special counsel would recommend abandoning the OLC opinion, but this is not such a case."

Within a day of Barr's summary, the special counsel's office sent a packet to the attorney general, enclosing the introduction and executive summary for each of the two volumes of Mueller's report, marked with redactions for grand jury material and asking that the documents be publicly released. Mueller sent another second letter to Barr two days later.

"The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public … did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office's work and conclusions," Mueller wrote. "There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation."

The letters appear to undercut Barr's testimony to two congressional panels in April that he was unaware of Mueller's opinion on Barr's letter or frustration among members of Mueller's team.

Barr, in his testimony to Congress, emphasized that Mueller, in a subsequent phone conversation, "never told me the expression of the findings was inaccurate," and that the special counsel attributed any public confusion to media accounts describing Barr's summary of the report, rather than Barr's letter itself.

"I called Bob and said, you know, what's the issue here? I asked him if he was suggesting that the March 24 letter was inaccurate. And he said no, but that the press reporting had been inaccurate, and that the press was reading too much into it," Barr testified.

"He said his concern focused on his explanation of why he did not reach a conclusion on obstruction, and he wanted more put out on that issue. He wanted – he argued for putting out summaries of each volume, the executive summaries that had been written by his office, and if not that, then other material that focused on the issue of why he didn't reach the obstruction question. But he was very clear to me that he was not suggesting that we had misrepresented his report."