From anon post two breads ago. With more info.
the link posted was zerohedge comments on the original article
https://archive.is/D93Hd
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-02/checkmate-how-president-trumps-legal-team-outfoxed-mueller
this is the original article
https://archive.is/rmlUD
https://humanevents.com/2019/05/01/checkmate/
ByWill Chamberlain onMay 1, 2019
Checkmate - How President Trump's Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller
and this is exactly what senator graham was referring to in the hearing this week
"Bob Mueller couldn't decide about obstruction – you did, is that right?"
"Yes."
summary:
By thanksgiving 2017 it appears that Mueller's team had moved beyond "collusion" and were concentrating on "obstruction."
From then on – it was a battle over the meaning of a particular statute about obstruction. Lawyers sparred but Mueller would not be moved over his own interpretation.
The theory of this reporter is – Trump's legal team asked Barr to analyze the statute to help clarify these difficulties. Did obstruction really mean "any act" could be interpreted as an attempt to influence "a proceeding" or does it involve particular components of intent.
No judge had jurisdiction.
It was up to the Attorney General to step in and give a clear definition of the statute. Sessions was recused. Rosenstein was silent/absent. If the statute did not get clarified, Mueller could continue his investigation for years and years in order to analyze any act Trump might do that could be defined as obstruction.
This is a lot of what Barr was referring to at the hearing May 1.
He and Mueller had gone head to head on the definition. Mueller could not decide. Barr DID decide.
———–
The Barr Memorandum on the interpretation of Obstruction statutes
19 pages
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/June-2018-Barr-Memo-to-DOJ-Muellers-Obstruction-Theory-1.2.pdf
https://archive.is/rmlUD
https://humanevents.com/2019/05/01/checkmate/
ByWill Chamberlain onMay 1, 2019
When the Mueller Report was released on April 18th, most commentators focused on the “explosive” factual allegations. But other than the shocking revelation that the President once used an expletive in private, very few of those facts were novel; most were leaked long ago.
In June 2018, Bill Barr, then in private practice at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote a detailed legal memorandum to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. This memo came to light in December, when Barr was nominated for Attorney General.
At the end of Volume II of the Mueller Report, however, there were 20 pages of genuinely new material.
There, the former FBI director turned Special Counsel Robert Mueller defended his “Application of Obstruction-Of-Justice Statutes To The President.” These overlooked 20 pages were dedicated to defending Mueller’s interpretation of a single subsection of a single obstruction-of-justice statute: 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2).
That’s quite strange, but you know what’s stranger still?
In June 2018, Bill Barr, then in private practice at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote a detailed legal memorandum to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. This memo came to light in December, when Barr was nominated for Attorney General.
The subject was Mueller’s interpretation of the aforementioned 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2).
When Barr’s memo first appeared, prominent liberal legal commentators were perplexed. Georgetown Law professor Marty Lederman wrote at Just Security:
“[T]he first huge and striking problem with Barr’s memo is that he unjustifiably makes countless assumptions about what Mueller is doing…From all that appears, Barr was simply conjuring from whole cloth a preposterously long set of assumptions about how Special Counsel Mueller was adopting extreme and unprecedented-within-DOJ views about every pertinent question and investigatory decision.”
At Lawfare, Mikhaila Fogel and Benjamin Wittes wrote:
“[I]t is not an exaggeration to say that Barr’s entire memo is predicated on two broad assumptions: first, that he knows Mueller’s legal theory, and second, that he understands the fact pattern that Mueller is investigating… Neither assumption is, in our judgment, warranted. Unlike Barr, we don’t purport to know what Mueller’s obstruction theory is.”
But now that we have the Mueller Report, things look very different.