By Steve Neavling
Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr in his forthcoming memoir criticizes the special counsel probe of Russia and former President Trump’s campaign, calling it a “heavy-handed criminal investigation.”
Barr’s book, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” takes aim at special counsel Robert Mueller, calling him “the wrong person to investigate it,” Yahoo News reports.
“But he never seemed to have stopped to examine whether there was an adequate basis for pursuing either a counterintelligence or criminal investigation,” Barr writes.
According to an FBI agent, Barr says, “after Mueller came in, the office quickly developed a ‘Get Trump’ attitude and began with a preexisting conviction that there must be ‘something criminal.”
Barr also slammed Mueller for staffing his office with Democrats.
“The whole purpose of appointing Mueller was to assure the public that partisanship would not be involved in the investigation,” Barr wrote. “Mueller defeated the very purpose of his appointment. His staffing decisions engendered deep distrust in half the country. Based on later information about the way the investigation was conducted, those fears were not wholly unjustified.”
Barr said one “glaring omission” of Mueller’s investigation was failing to examine the credibility of Christopher Steele’s dossier.
“Even though Mueller was supposed to investigate Russian efforts to interfere in the election, he never seemed to have explored the possibility that Steele’s dossier was used as a vector for Russian disinformation,” Barr wrote.
Near the end of the book, Barr describes Mueller’s “trembling” hands and “tremulous” voice, questioning whether Muller “might have an illness,” The New York Times reports.
