James Comey Says Robert Mueller Failed In His ‘Mission’ Due To ‘Inadequate Transparency’
On Saturday, former FBI Director James Comey said that “inadequate transparency” is the reason former Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed in his “mission,” reports The Hill. According to Comey, Mueller “didn’t succeed in his mission because there was inadequate transparency to the American people on whose behalf he was investigating.”
The former FBI director suggested that Attorney General William Barr is to blame for this failure, because he deliberately misinterpreted the contents of Mueller’s report pertaining to his investigation into Russian election interference and related matters.
According to Comey, because of “the way in which his report was spun, massaged and, in my view, misconstrued by the attorney general,” Mueller failed.
Furthermore, the former FBI director said, what contributed to Mueller’s failure was “they way in which [the report] was physically presented made it impossible for the American people to have access to it.”
According to Comey, Mueller “presented a great report,” but given that it is 446 pages long, “nobody sees the work he did,” except a small minority of the American people. The former FBI director concluded that the former special counsel should have made sure that the people actually understand his findings.
“I think part of his mandate is to make sure that the people who he represents have a reasonable understanding of what he found,” he said.
In his report, Mueller outlined 10 instances of potential obstruction of justice by the president, writing about systematic Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
However, Mueller found no proof of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, writing that neither the president nor any member of his campaign conspired with the Kremlin to win against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Ahead of the release of Mueller’s report, Barr published a memo declaring that Donald Trump is innocent when it comes to obstruction of justice. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein established that there was not enough evidence to charge the president with a crime.
According to Trump, Mueller’s Russia investigation was part of a greater conspiracy meant to forcefully remove him from office.
In a recent interview, the president suggested that Comey, along with former CIA Director John Brennan, DNI James Clapper, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, and CIA Director John Brennan had conspired to destroy his 2016 campaign, and his presidency.
This conspiracy, according to Trump, was “probably” orchestrated by former President Barack Obama.
A lot has happened since the release of Mueller’s report, and House Democrats have moved on to other matters. The president is currently being investigated for allegedly inappropriate contacts with the government of Ukraine, in what is being described as a formal impeachment inquiry.
