Victoria Toensing, an informal adviser to President Trump, told Hill.TV’s “Rising” on Monday that it would not have been possible for the president to obstruct justice in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe because his campaign never coordinated with the Kremlin.
“The president is completely exonerated on the Russian thing,” Toensing, an attorney at DiGenova & Toensing, told co-hosts Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton. “Now, does that have some kind of bearing on this so-called obstruction issue? Yes.”
“If I’m being investigated for robbing a bank, but there was no bank robbery? It’s a little difficult for me to obstruct the investigation into something that did not occur,” she added.
“False allegations were put up … that there was some kind of coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians that never happened, and so it’s really hard to obstruct something that never occurred,” she said.
Attorney General William Barr on Sunday sent Congress his summary of Mueller’s final report. Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, upon reviewing Mueller’s findings, determined that the president did not obstruct justice.
Democrats, in turn, have demanded to see all background materials that led to that conclusion.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) on Sunday called on Barr to testify before his panel.
“In light of the very concerning discrepancies and final decision making at the Justice Department following the Special Counsel report, where Mueller did not exonerate the President, we will be calling Attorney General Barr in to testify before [the House Judiciary Committee] in the near future,” he tweeted.
— Julia Manchester
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