William Barr Testimony Updates: He Says Mueller Report Will Be Public ‘Within a Week’ – The New York Times

“This whole mechanism for the special counsel, as I said, was established during the Clinton administration in the wake of Ken Starr’s report,” Mr. Barr said. “That’s why the current rule says the report should be kept confidential, because there was a lot of reaction against the publication of Ken Starr’s report and many of the people who are right now calling for release of this report were basically castigating Ken Starr and others for releasing the Starr report.”

Mr. Starr, the independent counsel leading the Clinton investigation, was operating under a now-defunct law that gave him the authority to send a report directly to Congress. The Republican-controlled Congress promptly made the whole thing public.

That experience helped persuade members of Congress of both parties that the independent counsel law should be permitted to lapse in 1999. But there was still a need for some kind of mechanism for prosecutors with a degree of independence to investigate potential high-level executive-branch wrongdoing.

Under then-Attorney General Janet Reno, the Clinton administration issued the special counsel regulation that governed Mr. Mueller’s investigation. Among other things, it called for the special counsel to write a “confidential” report for the attorney general, who would then relay his own report to Congress saying the investigation was over. In short, those rules did not envision a lengthy report from Mr. Mueller going to Congress and being published for the public to read — in any form.

“You will recognize that I’m operating under a regulation that was put together during the Clinton administration and does not provide for the publication of the report,” Mr. Barr said. “But I am relying on my own discretion to make as much public as I can.”

Barr: Don’t worry about defense of health-care law. The government will likely lose in court.

Representative Matt Cartwright, Democrat of Pennsylvania, assailed Mr. Barr and the Justice Department for declining to defend the Affordable Care Act in federal court in Texas, where a judge recently struck down the sweeping health-care law as unconstitutional.

Mr. Cartwright accused Mr. Barr of putting the weight of the Justice Department behind a political effort to invalidate the law and warned that it could result in millions of people losing their health care coverage.