Mr. Barr himself endorsed that view in his June 2018 memo for the Trump administration, when he was still a lawyer in private practice. Under that view, even if a president abuses his power by acting for corrupt reasons, it would be unconstitutional for Congress to make that a crime. It was hard to know from Mr. Barr’s letter what gave Mr. Mueller pause, noted Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches white-collar criminal law at Duke University. Without seeing Mr. Mueller’s underlying report, he said, it was impossible to evaluate the merits of both Mr. Mueller’s demurral and Mr. Barr’s decision to make a definitive statement in favor of Mr. Trump. “We really need to see what this report says — we need to see the analysis,” he said, adding: “How much of this is Mueller and how much of this is Barr?

Source: New York Times March 25, 2019 01:41 UTC