WASHINGTON ― U.S. Attorney General William Barr went to bat for U.S. President Donald Trump during a news conference Thursday morning ahead of the expected release of a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller's highly-anticipated report. Barr said earlier this month that Trump indicated he was leaving the decision on executive privilege to the attorney general. Instead, the attorney general wrote a four-page letter to U.S. Congress he claimed summarized the principal conclusions in the report. Mueller declined to "make a traditional prosecutorial judgment" about whether Trump obstructed justice, Barr wrote. Before he became attorney general, Barr sent Rosenstein an unsolicited memo arguing that the special counsel had no basis for even investigating whether the president obstructed justice.

Source: Huffington Post April 18, 2019 14:46 UTC