Rachel Maddow Mourns ‘Failure’ of Robert Mueller’s Trump Investigation — He Was ‘Wildly Outmaneuvered’ By Bill Barr

MS NOW star Rachel Maddow lamented the “failure” of former special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Donald Trump was due to Mueller being “wildly outmaneuvered” by then-Attorney General William Barr.

Maddow joined The Weekend: Primetime on Saturday to share her thoughts on Mueller, hours after he died at the age of 81. The MS NOW veteran was complimentary of Mueller overall, but said his two-year probe into Trump failed to land a devastating blow because Barr “outplayed” Mueller.

“There’s a reason on a day like this, we need to remind people what was in Mueller’s report — what were the results of his investigation — and that’s because of a failure on his part,” Maddow said. “That is because once his investigation and his report were concluded, he was just wildly outmaneuvered by a really serpentine Attorney General named Bill Barr, who played really dirty pool when it came to the handling and release of the information from Mueller’s investigation.”

She continued:

I don’t know if he was blindsided by it or if he thought Barr was a good guy and would be a straight shooter on this, but Barr absolutely buried him in terms of in terms of the impact of of that report. And given the way that bill Barr became attorney general, Mueller and his team should have seen that coming.

If they did see it coming, they should have come up with a way to outmaneuver Barr while he was outmaneuvering them, and they didn’t. And that bureaucratic failure is the most important thing in American history about the Mueller report — not his findings, but the way they were submarined by a, in my opinion, disreputable, dishonorable set of actions by the attorney general who handled the release of that report.

Mueller is widely known as the special prosecutor who oversaw the investigation into accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and accusations of ties between Russia and Trump’s campaign.

He was appointed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to lead the investigation in 2017, and he filed his report to Barr in 2019, about a month after he became attorney general.

Mueller’s report concluded Russia interfered in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” to benefit Trump over his opponent Hillary Clinton, but the investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

The president called the investigation a “witch hunt” and often blasted Mueller. The investigation into Trump and Russia dominated cable and political news shows for much of Trump’s first term, and after Mueller filed his report in March 2019, the president said it was “Total EXONERATION.”

He added, “It’s a shame that our country had to go through this.”

Trump on Saturday did not mince words in a brief Truth Social post about Mueller.

“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” Trump posted. “He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

Watch above via MS NOW.

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