This is Spectator Radio, the Spectator's curated podcast collection.

Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics

and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website. I'm joined today by Kurt Mills, who is, I'm very

pleased to say, the brand new Washington editor of Spectator USA. Kurt, it's great to have you

on board. Welcome aboard. Absolutely. I'm thrilled to be here. I think we're going to come to you

quite regularly on this podcast and Spectator USA readers will be reading your name a lot more

and we're going to be wanting to know what's going on in Washington and you're the man to tell us.

Yes.

And today I want to talk about William Barr, the Attorney General, and what's been going on there?

What's the latest from Washington?

The latest is in this sort of meta-battle to control the narrative surrounding the special

counsel's release of the Russia report. Mr. Barr, the Attorney General, after being nominated

this early earlier this year as a sort of establishment caretaker of the role has won

fresh plaudits on the right for his sort of ferocious handling of the release of the report.

It's clearly making his long-term, longtime friend Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, uncomfortable,

although Mueller appears loathe to reject Barr's presentation of his findings in their entirety.

The crux of it is that Barr spoke to Congress this week in open hearing, agreed to one public display and rejected another.

And he also threw in a couple of barbs at his old friend Mueller, calling Mueller's letter

to the Attorney General a bit, quote, snitty and questioning the medium through which he expressed

moderate frustration, at one point saying, why didn't Mueller just call me?

Well, this is an interesting dynamic at play here, because it's been a sort of portrayed as a flaw

in, let's call it, the anti-Trump's narrative of how the Mueller inquiry ended.

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