“The chairman of the Judiciary Committee is free to go to court if he feels one of those exceptions is applicable,” Mr. Barr said, adding: “My intention is not to ask for it at this stage. I mean, if the chairman has a good explanation of why 6(e) does not apply and his need for the information, I’m willing to listen.”
Barr recalls Democrats’ anger over the publication of the Starr report.
Under pressure to give Congress the entire text of the Mueller report, Mr. Barr repeatedly reminded his critics that he is operating under rules written by Clinton administration officials to prevent a repetition of the Whitewater-Monica Lewinsky scandal, where Ken Starr gave lawmakers a long report that contained detailed narrative description of the evidence, including lurid sexual details and extensive legal analysis of potential crimes by the president.
Mr. Barr’s point seemed to be: If you have a problem with this process, blame the Clinton Democrats.
“This whole mechanism for the special counsel, as I said, was established during the Clinton administration in the wake of Ken Starr’s report,” Mr. Barr said. “That’s why the current rule says the report should be kept confidential, because there was a lot of reaction against the publication of Ken Starr’s report and many of the people who are right now calling for release of this report were basically castigating Ken Starr and others for releasing the Starr report.”
Mr. Starr, the independent counsel leading the Clinton investigation, was operating under a now-defunct law that gave him the authority to send a report directly to Congress. The Republican-controlled Congress promptly made the whole thing public.
That experience helped persuade members of Congress of both parties that the independent counsel law should be permitted to lapse in 1999. But there was still a need for some kind of mechanism for prosecutors with a degree of independence to investigate potential high-level executive-branch wrongdoing.
Under then-Attorney General Janet Reno, the Clinton administration issued the special counsel regulation that governed Mr. Mueller’s investigation. Among other things, it called for the special counsel to write a “confidential” report for the attorney general, who would then relay his own report to Congress saying the investigation was over. In short, those rules did not envision a lengthy report from Mr. Mueller going to Congress and being published for the public to read — in any form.