i highly recommend reading the full transcript of Barr's

Posted on: May 31, 2019 at 11:42:41 CT

CBS interview from yesterday.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/william-barr-interview-full-transcript-cbs-this-morning-jan-crawford-exclusive-2019-05-31/

several interesting points were brought up.

he says regardless of any OLC opinion he thought Mueller was going to make a decision on obstruction.

talks about how he asked Mueller to highlight the grand jury material so it could be redacted easily and thereby ensure the report was released quickly after completion. Barr says he asked them numerous times to do this but when they got the report the Mueller team surprisingly didn't highlight this material at all.

this is what prompted Barr to write his summary. b/c it was going to take so long to redact the grand jury material after the Mueller team failed to highlight it. Said he wouldn't have even written it had Mueller team had followed through on his request.

Kind of makes you wonder why the f*ck the Mueller team said they would do this, but didn't in the end.

says that he doesn't agree with a lot of the legal analysis in the report. his take on the comey firing is an example of this:

WILLIAM BARR: Well let's take the firing of Comey for example I think we would have said as a matter of law, and I'm not relying on my - my legal memo that I wrote as a private citizen but really on the views within the department of the people who think about these things and are responsible for framing the views of the department, and I think we would have said that as a matter of law the obstruction statutes do not reach facially valid exercise of core presidential authority or official authority even, decisions by the attorney general in administering the executive branch or litigation. But we didn't rely on that, we then looked at that issue let's take the again the firing of Comey. One of the elements is that you have to show that the act objectively speaking will have the probable effect of obstructing a proceeding and we don't believe that the firing of an agency head could be established as having the probable effect, objectively speaking, of sabotaging a proceeding. There was also we would have to prove corrupt intent, the report itself points out that one of the likely motivations here was the president's frustration with Comey saying something publicly and saying a different thing privately and refusing to correct the record. So that would not have been a corrupt intent. So for each of these episodes we thought long and hard about it, we looked at the facts and we didn't feel the government could establish obstruction in these cases

has some not so kind words for Brennan, although he doesn't name him:

Former senior intelligence officials who were purporting to have it- or intimating that they had inside information were suggesting that the president and his family were going to be indicted and so forth--

JAN CRAWFORD: And saying that publicly?

WILLIAM BARR: Saying that publicly. There was all kind of wild and--

JAN CRAWFORD: And you knew that to be false?

WILLIAM BARR: Yes, and it was wild and irresponsible speculation going on which the very--

JAN CRAWFORD: Wild and irresponsible. The former intelligence officials' speculation--

WILLIAM BARR: Right

he's critical of the response from the Obama Admin to the Russian meddling in 2016 saying, "Surely the response should have been more than just, you know, dangling a confidential informant in front of a peripheral player in the Trump Campaign." and " one of the things here is that these efforts in 2016, these counter-intelligence activities that were directed at the Trump Campaign, were not done in the normal course and not through the normal procedures as a far as I can tell."

He believes the danger from internal governmental meddling in the election process is a threat " In my mind, they are, sure. I mean, republics have fallen because of Praetorian Guard mentality where government officials get very arrogant, they identify the national interest with their own political preferences and they feel that anyone who has a different opinion, you know, is somehow an enemy of the state. And you know, there is that tendency that they know better and that, you know, they're there to protect as guardians of the people. That can easily translate into essentially supervening the will of the majority and getting your own way as a government official."

some other nuggets: IG is looking only at Page FISA warrant. Huber was to help him on that but largely took a wait and see approach with the IG report. Huber has been replaced by Durham. We all knew that, but he also said Huber "The other issues he's been working on relate to Hillary Clinton. Those are winding down and hopefully, we'll be in a position to bring those to fruition."

says the official explanation of events doesn't match up with what he's seen. "I had a lot of questions about what was going on. I assumed I'd get answers when I went in and I have not gotten answers that are well satisfactory, and in fact, probably have more questions, and that some of the facts that- that I've learned don't hang together with the official explanations of what happened."

"Because I think the activities were undertaken by a small group at the top which is one of the- probably one of the mistakes that has been made instead of running this as a normal bureau investigation or counterintelligence investigation. It was done by the executives at the senior level. Out of headquarters--"