Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg joined other Democrats in criticizing Attorney General William Barr for planning a press conference Thursday morning before releasing a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller's report to members of Congress, saying it shows the Trump administration's failure to maintain transparency.
"It's really disturbing, but more evidence of this administration's attitude on transparency," Buttigieg told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" during an extensive interview about his candidacy, which he announced earlier this week.
He said he learned very quickly as mayor of South Bend, Indiana that when people don't have full information, "they're going to fill in the blanks, and they're going to fill in the worst."
Buttigieg said that he would "imagine what's happening here, there's a lot of redaction, and I'm guessing they want to fill in the blanks a certain way, put a certain idea in our heads before we have a chance to formulate our own opinion."
The solution to that, he added, is "maximum transparency."
"On our most sensitive issues at home, we tried to [release] as much information as we could and we just published them online so everybody could read them and didn't have to dig them up out of the courtroom themselves," said Buttigieg. "If we were going to get beat up on something, at least it was factual and we could explain our choices, admit to anything that could have been done differently and move on."
He added that if he was advising a president at a moment like this, "I would advise being as transparent as you can. Instead, it sounds like what they want to do is describe this and then turn it over."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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