President Donald Trump declared Sunday that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election was a “total and complete exoneration” of him, even though the attorney general wrote that the findings stated otherwise.
Muller’s report was delivered to the Department of Justice on Saturday and summarized by Attorney General Wiliam Barr in a four-page letter to Congress on Sunday. Barr’s summary stated that Mueller did not find the Trump campaign colluded with Russian actors to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election but that the president had not been exonerated from possibly obstructing justice.
According to Barr’s summary, the special counsel wrote that, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Still, Trump tweeted the opposite.
Twitter users were quick to fact-check the president, noting that the line Barr included in his summary about Trump not being exonerated was seemingly a direct quote from Mueller’s findings.
Barr wrote that Mueller left the decision of whether to prosecute Trump for attempting to obstruct justice by interfering in the special counsel’s investigation to Barr. The attorney general wrote there wasn’t sufficient evidence to conclude Trump obstructed justice.