Attorney General nominee William Barr doubled down on his refusal to give senators a guarantee to publicly release special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report when it is completed on the eve of what was scheduled to be the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation vote, the Washington Post reports. But, as the committee convened Tuesday morning, senators agreed to put off voting until next week.
In written answers to the committee, Barr vowed “as much transparency as I can consistent with the law” in several of the answers he provided to panel senators, who challenged him to offer better assurances that he would release the report than he did during a confirmation hearing earlier this month. Democrats on the panel also failed to secure a firmer promise from Barr to alert them if Justice Department ethics officials advise him to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller probe, reserving the final decision for himself. Some senators are less ready to defer to Barr’s judgment than he would like. On Monday, Sens. Richard J. Blumenthal (D-CT) and Charles E. Grassley (R-IA), the former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill to guarantee that every special-counsel report would be released directly to Congress and the public, effectively taking out the attorney general as middleman.