“After three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead,” Mr. Trump said. “The collusion delusion is over.”
Mr. Barr has weighed whether to assert the administration’s power to keep portions of the report secret from Congress, under the executive privilege that can protect internal information like the president’s private conversations. Some of those discussions were at the heart of the question of whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed the inquiry, complicating the issue.
Mr. Barr reiterated that Mr. Trump has publicly stated that he will defer to the Justice Department, “although the president would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report,” the attorney general wrote.
“Accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review,” Mr. Barr added.
However, it remains an open question whether Justice Department lawyers themselves will excise material they believe could be privileged before sending the report to Congress.
It is also not clear whether Mr. Barr or other politically appointed officials would be a part of such a redaction process. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on how the department would handle executive privilege issues.
House Democrats have already begun portraying the results of the Mueller investigation as a starting point for their scrutiny of Mr. Trump. They have opened investigations into Mr. Trump’s campaign and his business dealings before and after he took office, and other law enforcement investigations loom, including inquiries into Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee and his role in hush-money payments during the election to women who claimed extramarital affairs with him. Mr. Trump has denied the affairs, though he has insisted that the payments were private transactions that violated no laws.