Sen. Feinstein Grills Barr on Trump’s Orders to McGahn: ‘So You Can … Instruct Someone to Lie?’

Senate Judiciary Ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein pressed Attorney General William Barr Wednesday with a multitude of questions about about what Robert Mueller‘s report revealed about Don McGahn.

Ever since the special counsel’s findings came out, there has been a great deal of intrigue about the sections saying President Donald Trump tried to have his former White House lawyer fire Mueller and then change his story about it for him. When Feinstein presented Barr with these sections of “substantial evidence” from the Mueller report, she asked him “does existing law prohibit efforts to get a witness to lie to say something the witness believes is false?”

Barr answered that lying to the government is prohibited, so Feinstein continued to focus on the McGahn findings and asked if this presents a credible charge to be made under the statue of obstruction.

“We felt that that episode, the government would not be able to establish obstruction,” Barr answered. He referred to McGahn’s account of how Trump wanted Mueller fired because of an alleged “conflict of interest,” which the president has chalked up to a “nasty” business dispute from before Mueller was considered to lead the FBI.

Barr went on to say that Trump’s order to McGahn was a reaction to a mischaracterization from a New York Times report which said the president directed Mueller’s firing. This, Barr explained, was is different from removing a special counsel over conflict of interest.

“There is evidence the president truly felt that the Times article was inaccurate and he wanted McGahn to correct it. So we believe that it would be impossible for the government to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the president understood that he was instructing McGahn to say something false because it wasn’t necessarily false. Moreover, McGahn had weeks before already given testimony to the special counsel and the president was aware of that. And as the report indicates, it could also have been the case that what — that he was primarily concerned about press reports and making it clear that he never outright directed the firing of Mueller.”

When Feinstein noted the Trump still “essentially [tried] to change the lawyers’ account in order to prevent further criticism of himself,” Barr countered with “that’s not a crime,” so Feinstein asked “so you can, in this situation, instruct someone to lie?”

Barr said the lie would have to involve impairing evidence for it to qualify as obstruction, and that led to Feinstein asking whether there was a real “identifiable conflict” in this situation, “or else doesn’t it just become a fabrication?”

Watch above, via Fox News

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!