The Justice Department and the office of Special Counsel have just issued a joint clarification Mueller’s statement from this morning.
Check it out:
DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec and Mueller spokesman Peter Carr insist “there is no conflict between” Barr and Mueller statements on the role DOJ policy against indicting a sitting president played in Mueller’s decision re: obstruction. pic.twitter.com/YMMyeSf6sc
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) May 29, 2019
Actually Mueller’s statement this morning didn’t sounds so ‘clear’ to me as I was hearing it. It sounded to me that Mueller was saying the OLC opinion was the only reason he didn’t find Trump guilty and sentence to him life in a Russian gulag, which is what Democrats heard to. We all heard it, which is why it was clear to many that Mueller overstepped his bounds.
Yet now both the DOJ and the Special Counsel are releasing this statement to say that’s NOT the case. Wow.
What puzzles me is that we heard this morning that both the DOJ and the White House had the statement beforehand. If they didn’t like the statement Mueller was going to read, why didn’t they fix it before he went out? Or did Mueller change it on his own either before or at the podium?
I can imagine that Trump was pretty steamed today as all of this unraveled and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the impetus behind this clarification.