EXCERPT:
HEILEMANN: “You know, I think it's being too nice to Barr to say he is a political hack, something that we discussed on the show before, I obviously agree with that, but worse than just trying to spin the report yesterday is just blatantly lying about it in a number of ways, knowing presumably that he was going to get found out for that lie, which kind of elevates it to the thing you were discussing before which I think is, what’s the strategy, what’s the game that Barr is playing? Because he had to know he was going to exposed. And when I say he lied about it ,I mean it in a couple of very distinct ways. One of which is the thing Willie just alluded to, you know, the 'no collusion' mantra, it’s not that the report found no collusion. It’s that the report explicitly says, 'We reject the notion of collusion as meaningful.' It says it right there on the page. It says, 'Collusion is not a meaningful term. We weren't trying to figure that out. We were focused on a much narrower definition, a very specific thing, of what constitutes coordination and conspiracy.' And yet Barr is saying, attributing to Mueller and the report, that it found no collusion. Again, as I said, the report says that’s not is what’s at issue. The second really compelling thing that goes to this obstruction piece is that Barr yesterday essentially said Rod Rosenstein and I looked at what Mueller wrote here, the evidence of obstruction, which was not definitive in the report for various reasons we’ll get into, but he didn’t make a determination. So Rod Rosenstein and Barr decided he hadn’t obstructed justice and the reason was that we weighed very heavily the fact that the White House cooperated fully with the special counsel, and yet the special counsel's report is 448 pages of details of the ways in which Donald Trump did not cooperate fully with the special counsel, lied to the special counsel, had other people lie to the special counsel, refused to testify to the special counsel. The report is a giant buffet of examples of studied noncooperation. And yet Barr is saying, 'The reason we didn’t find obstruction was because Trump was cooperative.' There's no other word for me other than it's a bald-faced lie, and that's why I think you’re right about the place in history that Bill Barr has now earned himself, which is pretty ignominious."