Attorney General William P. Barr is scheduled to testify today before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and President Trump’s efforts to impede that inquiry.

The Senate hearing is expected to start at 10 a.m. Eastern. The New York Times will stream the testimony and provide live coverage and analysis.

Mr. Barr is certain to be pressed about Mr. Mueller’s objections to how the attorney general characterized parts of the report before it was released, which were revealed late Tuesday.

Mr. Barr plans to defend his handling of the report, including his decision to write a letter outlining its conclusions rather than release the report’s summaries. “I did not believe that it was in the public interest to release additional portions of the report in piecemeal fashion, leading to public debate over incomplete information,” he wrote in prepared remarks.

Mr. Barr is also scheduled to testify on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee, but that appearance is in doubt. He is engaged in a dispute with the chairman of the House panel, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, over his party’s plan to have committee staff lawyers rather than lawmakers question him.

Here’s what to watch for today.

Democrats were expected to grill Mr. Barr about his handling of the report, including pressing him on why he pronounced Mr. Trump cleared of obstruction of justice.

In his report, Mr. Mueller laid out extensive evidence suggesting that several of Mr. Trump’s actions met the criteria for criminal obstruction of justice, and stopped short of deciding whether to accuse him of it for now only because the Justice Department had said that sitting presidents may not be indicted. The special counsel objected to how Mr. Barr characterized those findings, saying the attorney general’s description lacked context.

Democrats were also expected to press Mr. Barr about how he portrayed Mr. Mueller’s report more broadly.

Mr. Barr wrote a four-page letter to Congress in March after receiving the report from the special counsel, and about three weeks before he made public a partly redacted version. A side-by-side comparison shows Mr. Barr quoted fragments of Mr. Mueller’s sentences out of context, making them sound better for the president.

Some Democrats have accused the attorney general of misleading Congress when he told Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, that he did not know whether Mr. Mueller agreed with his conclusions on obstruction. Mr. Van Hollen and Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, called for Mr. Barr to resign.

Mr. Barr will defend his handling of the report.

He said in his prepared remarks that he cleared Mr. Trump of possible obstruction-of-justice charges because Mr. Mueller forced his hand by declining to make a decision on prosecution.

But Mr. Barr’s remarks did not address questions about whether he omitted so many key details about the report that it warped the public’s perception of Mr. Mueller’s work and undermined the investigation’s credibility.

Republicans were expected to portray Mr. Mueller’s findings as exonerating Mr. Trump.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the Judiciary Committee’s chairman, has said that he has seen enough and that “it’s over for me.” The Republicans on the committee are also likely to defend Mr. Barr’s handling of the report.

Republicans were also expected to criticize the F.B.I. for early steps agents took to try to understand whether Trump associates were working with the Russians.

The last time Mr. Barr appeared before Congress, he said he thought that the F.B.I. had engaged in “spying” on the Trump campaign. He then seemed to walk back that framing, saying that he meant that he wanted to know if the government had engaged in surveillance without a proper legal basis.

Charlie Savage is a Washington-based national security and legal policy correspondent. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Boston Globe and The Miami Herald. His most recent book is “Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy.” @charlie_savage • Facebook

Source: Read Full Article