MSNBC's Ari Melber wonders why Barr's summary only has 4 partial quotes from the Mueller report

Ari Melber.
(Image credit: Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP)

After Attorney General William Barr's summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report was released on Sunday, MSNBC's Ari Melber noticed something interesting.

"This is four pages and there's not a single full sentence in here that's quoted the Mueller report," he said. "Every quote from the Mueller report itself is a partial sentence." Many of those partial sentences, like the one saying it was not established that "members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities," are "quite important," Melber said, but it's "really striking that Barr basically said, 'I'm going to do this through the weekend. Mueller spent 22 months on it. I can do it in under 48 hours, and go beyond the Mueller report's findings.'"

Barr, Melber said, is "relaying one finding on no election collusion/conspiracy. That's big, and then he's going beyond the other finding that there is evidence of obstruction. The president is not exonerated, but he's also not accused of a crime, and the House is where that would usually be dealt with." The House, he continued, is "kind of being muscled out in an attempt by the new attorney general to say, 'I'm gonna issue my own conclusion on that,' and he's dong that with these four partial sentences."

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It doesn't take a lawyer or a Washington insider to start wondering if "these four sentences, partial, are the very best [Barr] could find in the entire Mueller report about Donald Trump, and they are what's in the early letter," Melber said. Watch the clip below. Catherine Garcia

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.