Barr to hold Thursday press conference on Mueller report

Attorney General William Barr will hold a press conference Thursday morning on the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Wednesday.

Both Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who previously oversaw the Mueller probe, will be at the press conference, scheduled for 9:30 a.m.

{mosads}A DOJ spokesperson said earlier this week that Mueller’s redacted report would be released Thursday morning.

President Trump also said Wednesday that Barr would be holding a press conference and that he also might hold his own conference.

The release of Mueller’s report is highly anticipated, as it’s expected to include the special counsel’s findings during the course of his 22 month investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Barr said in a letter to Congress last month that Mueller determined that there was no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, but that the special counsel did not reach such a conclusion on obstruction of justice.

Rather, Barr said, Mueller laid out the evidence for both sides of an obstruction charge. The attorney general said he and Rosenstein determined that the evidence was not sufficient to bring forward such a charge against Trump.

That evidence is likely to be seized upon by Democrats in Congress, some of whom have argued that Barr should not have been the one to decide against charging the president with obstruction.

But the report is also expected to be heavily redacted, as Barr has said he will not include some information, such as grand jury materials, in the public version of the report.

The House Judiciary Committee, led by chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), voted along party lines earlier this month to authorize a subpoena to obtain the full report from the DOJ. And Democrats are threatening to use that subpoena if they feel that too much information has been left out of the report.

Meanwhile, Republicans — including Trump himself — have used Barr’s summary letter on the Mueller report to claim that the president is exonerated of all wrongdoing.