Mueller's hiring of partisan officials undermined findings, not Barr's summary, Texas lawmaker claims

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Rep. Ratcliffe to Mueller: Barr didn't undermine confidence in your investigation conclusions, you did

Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe reacts to a new report that says Mueller expressed concerns about Barr's summary of his report.

Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe says Robert Mueller himself, not Attorney General Bill Barr, undermined the public’s confidence in the Russia investigation report after hiring allegedly biased officials to the special counsel’s team.

“One thing that's not in dispute is that Bill Barr invited Bob Mueller to review the four-page notice that he sent to Congress. Bob Mueller said no thanks. And then after the letter became public, Bob Mueller apparently had a problem with it,” he said on “Fox and Friends” Wednesday morning.

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“The other thing is the reason he said he has a problem with it is that he is afraid that it will undermine the full confidence of the public in his conclusions,” he continued.

“Memo to Bob, when he put Peter Strzok and Lisa page and Andrew Weissman on the Special Counsel team, when he staffed the Special Counsel team with folks that had supported only Democrats, and when he himself agreed to investigate Donald Trump as the Special Counsel two days after he interviewed to work for Donald Trump as FBI director and didn't get the job, When he did all of those things, he killed any chance that there was going to be full public confidence in his conclusions."

“Memo to Bob, when he put Peter Strzok and Lisa page and Andrew Weissman on the Special Counsel team, when he staffed the Special Counsel team with folks that had supported only Democrats, ... When he did all of those things, he killed any chance that there was going to be full public confidence in his conclusions."

— Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe

The Republican’s comments came just hours before the attorney general is set to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He may testify on Thursday in front of the House Judiciary Committee, though that remains unclear as Democrats’ insist on lawyers questioning Barr during the hearing.

The testimony today comes amid the Washington Post story on Tuesday that Mueller contacted – in a letter and phone call – Barr to let him know that his summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the Russia investigation report.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: MUELLER'S LETTER TO BARR – A NEAT TRICK BY THE WASHINGTON POST BEFORE HEARINGS BEGIN

Mueller reportedly pushed Barr to release the executive summaries written by his office, though at no point did Mueller suggest that Barr's summary of the report was inaccurate. Instead, Mueller told Barr that media coverage of the letter had “misinterpreted” the results of the probe concerning obstruction of justice.

Ratcliffe said that the most important aspect of Mueller’s letter is that, “the minute Bill Barr heard that Bob Mueller had a problem with the contents of it, he wrote another letter to Congress to clarify” and “made himself available” to be questioned about it.

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“Bill Barr is doing everything he possibly can to be fair about this. But I think to be fair, if you want to ask questions about a 448-page report, the guy we ought to be talking to is Bob Mueller not Bill Barr, he added.

If the testimony to the House occurs tomorrow, the Republican said he will use his chance to ask Barr more about the claim that the Trump campaign may have been possibly spied on during the presidential campaign in 2016.

“Bob Mueller found there was no conclusion, no conspiracy, doesn't mean there couldn't be a proper predicate to look for it or probable cause,” he said.

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“But if the probable cause was the Steele dossier, a fake, phony dossier, if that was the basis of the probable cause, there are a lot of folks at the FBI and Department of Justice that will have some explaining to do,” he added. “Bill Barr is going to get a lot of questions about what evidence there was at the basis of this surveillance of the Trump campaign.”