"House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that his panel would make a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding potential false testimony by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of the private military contractor Blackwater and an ally of President Trump.
…
Prince later told congressional officials examining Russia’s interference in the presidential election that the meeting happened by chance and was not taken at the behest of the incoming administration — testimony that congressional Democrats now think was false.
Prince told special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators a version of the Seychelles meeting that is at odds in several key respects with his sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017.
Erik Prince, the founder and chief executive of Blackwater Worldwide, in 2008. (Gerry Broome/AP)
“We know from the Mueller report that that was not a chance meeting,” Schiff told Post reporter Robert Costa during an interview at the event. “We know there were communications after he returned.”
While I’ll grant that I know little to nothing about Erik and Betsy’s relationship, I would doubt that he keeps her up to date with his various questionable foreign business and political machinations. He is a security contractor by profession so, questionable morals aside, we would still expect that he knows how to keep things under a wrap.
Tomorrow is the deadline for the subpoenaed unredacted Mueller report. Will Congress receive it?
Tomorrow, Attorney General Barr is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Will he turn up, given that he has says he will not testify in the format the committees wish to use?
Meanwhile, Democratic Senators have called on the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate Attorney General Barr’s handling of the Mueller report.
I can’t find the story yet, but MSNBC is now breaking news that the Washington Post is publishing a story that Mueller sent a letter to Barr saying that Barr’s remarks in advance of his release of the Mueller report failed to capture the “context, nature and substance of the probe.”
The letter was sent after Barr released his letter summary-that-wasn’t-a-summary.
Mueller apparently also indicated that Barr directly contradicted Mueller’s views, that in fact the only reason he, Mueller, did not indict Trump on obstruction charges was because of the DOJ policy prohibiting it. Barr said exactly the opposite at his press conference.
Wow.
ETA: Ninja’d by Fiveyearlurker, and well done – you have the link to the story!
The “story” is not much longer than the title yet though.
On edit, they expanded it.
Pretty sure that I expressed disbelief that the Republican party would be so brazen as to have an AG lie about the report. I apologize for underestimating their slime. It won’t happen again.
How could you think that even before this. Barr said the decision no to indict didn’t have anything to do with DOJ guidelines about a sitting president and the report said that’s the only reason they didn’t indict.
That Mueller would be unhappy with how the report was portrayed by Barr is, I think, something that all Mueller watchers would have known, but having this information out in the open and on record feels like a significant moment.
It’s a bit like when space scientists recently took a photograph of a black hole, therefore finally allowing them to prove to the masses that their zany ideas were, in fact, reality.
I still find it kind of amazing that so many mainstream journalists just assumed that Barr was being accurate in his letter and statements about the Mueller report. Why would anyone with half a brain assume this administration is being honest and accurate about something that could be profoundly damaging?
Certainly it looks reasonable to require Barr to recuse himself from oversight of any and all ongoing investigations that arose from the work of the Special Counsel.
The report on Rachel is that Mueller sent Barr a letter expressing his unhappiness with Barr’s significant misrepresentation of the report’s conclusions and the two men also had a phone call. This was several weeks before Barr testified that he wasn’t aware that Mueller had any issues with Barr’s summary-not-a-summary.
So yes. Barr, the Attorney General of the United States, our chief law enforcement officer, knowingly and deliberately committed perjury before the Senate.
The sad thing is that the Republicans in the Senate are unlikely to do anything about it.
