Fox anchor Shannon Bream defends Barr, saying he didn't have to release Mueller's report

Bream: “It could have been one page. It could have been the four page letter he sent a couple weeks ago.”

From the April 18 edition of Fox News' The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino:

Video file

DANA PERINO (HOST): Shannon Bream, I did want to ask you about this. It's very lightly redacted. I worked at the Justice Department for a while, I know redactions are very frustrating to people. I think we have a full screen that we can pull up that shows that they did try to provide the American people as much as they possibly could in this report. But also to your point, earlier, and we'll repeat it here, the attorney general didn't have to do this at all. 

SHANNON BREAM (FOX NEWS ANCHOR): Yeah, there's nothing in the statute of the regulations that require him to do this. I mean, the way that it works is that the attorney, or the special counsel has to report to the attorney general on his findings. It simply says that the attorney general has to report on those things to Congress. It could have been one page. It could have been the four page letter he sent a couple of weeks ago. He wasn't obligated to release this publicly or to Congress. So for people who were worried about his transparency, which he pledged to do, I would hope that many of them would look at this today and they may still have their concerns on the issue of collusion, but each redaction is spelled out perfectly.

But what people were really wanting to dig into was obstruction, so on that volume, too, hundreds of pages there of material that is both flattering and unflattering to the president has been revealed. Barr promised when he was asked by Senator Shaheen on the Hill that he would not withhold information that could be damaging to the president. So it looks like he's made the effort here. We'll see if it's enough for Congress, because as we've talked about, House Judiciary has already approved subpoenas and they say they'll use them if they need to.

Previously:

Media trumpeted William Barr's spin on the Mueller report (again) -- will they ever learn?

Fox anchor Bret Baier claims William Barr was “laying it out straight, cut and dry” in press conference prior to Mueller report release

Fox's Ed Henry falsely claims “you can't obstruct something if there is no underlying crime”