Barr Testimony
Forbes
We ran the numbers: There are 5697 news articles covering this topic. 16% (884) are left leaning, 41% (2313) center, and 44% (2500) are right leaning.
On Wednesday, May 1, Attorney General William Barr testified for five hours in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Barr answered questions about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election as well as about Barr’s handling of Mueller’s report. In March, Barr, who was then the only person to have read the report, wrote a memo claiming that the report exonerated President Trump of collusion with Russia. The Justice Department released a redacted version of the report on April 18, which showed that while Mueller did not find enough evidence to charge Trump with conspiracy, the president did attempt to obstruct the investigation. A recently-released letter shows that Mueller wrote to Barr to protest Barr’s portrayal of the report.
At the hearing, Democratic senators alleged that Barr had deliberately misled the public about the contents of the Mueller report. Republicans, in contrast, decried the fact that Mueller’s investigation was conducted at all, saying that it was an attempt by Democrats to undermine the results of the 2016 election. Barr refused to appear for a parallel hearing at the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.
Left-leaning articles emphasized the tensions between Barr and Mueller; for instance, USA Today ran the headline “Barr vs. Mueller: The attorney general fights his own battle with the special counsel as he stands up for Trump.” The right, in contrast, focused on Barr’s perspective, saying he “fired back” at the Democrats and on Trump’s response. New York Post ran the headline “Trump slams 2020 Dems as ‘lunatics,’ claims Barr did ‘fantastic’ job”. NPR, a reliably centrist source, focused primarily on the next steps in the aftermath of the Mueller report’s release.