The House Judiciary Committee led by Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) will vote on Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for a full, unredacted copy of the nearly 400 page Mueller report, according to CNN and the Wall Street Journal.
Nadler said Monday that he had scheduled a markup on Wednesday to authorize a subpoena for the Mueller report, as well as the special counsel’s underlying evidence. The markup would give the New York Democrat the green light to subpoena the report, though Nadler has not said whether he would do so before Attorney General William Barr releases a redacted version publicly, which he is expected to do later this month. –CNN
Nadler’s committee will also vote on whether to issue subpoenas for five former White House staffers; Steve Bannon, Hope Hicks, Reince Priebus, Don McGahn and Ann Donaldson – who Nadler claims may have received documents from the White House connected to the Mueller probe that would waive executive privilege.
On Friday, Barr sent Nadler and Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham a letter notifying them that he was working with Mueller to redact sensitive information which could affect ongoing matters – including grand jury material, information that would infringe on someone’s personal privacy or information which could compromise the DOJ’s sources and methods of investigation, and that the redacted report would be ready by mid-April “if not sooner.”
This wasn’t good enough for Nadler, who responded “As I informed the Attorney General..Congress requires the full and complete Mueller report, without redactions, as well as access to the underlying evidence, by April 2. That deadline still stands.”
Nadler also said Barr should work with Congress through the court system to allow the grand jury material to be made public – which one Democratic aide called the “primary obstacle” to its full release.
“We have an obligation to read the full report, and the Department of Justice has an obligation to provide it, in its entirely, without delay. If the department is unwilling to produce the full report voluntarily, then we will do everything in our power to secure it for ourselves,” wrote Nadler in a New York Times op-ed published Monday. “We require the report, first, because Congress, not the attorney general, has a duty under the Constitution to determine whether wrongdoing has occurred. The special counsel declined to make a ‘traditional prosecutorial judgment’ on the question of obstruction, but it is not the attorney general’s job to step in and substitute his judgment for the special counsel’s.”
Top House Judiciary Republican Georgia Rep. Doug Collins has accused Nadler of trying to force Barr to “break the law by releasing the report without redactions.”
Democrats argue that there’s ample precedent for Barr to release the full report to Congress, including grand jury material, pointing to the investigations into Watergate and former President Bill Clinton. They’re also citing the Republican-led investigation in the last Congress into the FBI and Justice Department’s handling of the Clinton and Trump-Russia investigations, in which Republicans demanded sensitive law-enforcement documents from the department. –CNN
Last month Barr released a four-page summary of Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation into Russian matters surrounding the 2016 US election – which concluded that President Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia. Mueller let Barr and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein decide whether Trump obstructed Justice, which they ruled he did not.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2uBT7L0 Tyler Durden