Top House and Senate Democrats including Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer are demanding that Attorney General Barr turn over all of Mueller’s materials related to his investigation.
Congress Wants Everything Related To The Mueller Probe
In a letter signed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Senate Judiciary Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate Intelligence Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA), the Democrats wrote:
The Department of Justice has an obligation to work with the relevant committees of the House and Senate to reach an accommodation on the full report and the underlying materials. Since your March 22 letter announcing the end of the Mueller investigation, our senior Members have written to you on numerous occasions. We have asked reasonable questions and raised legitimate concerns about your handling of this report. So far, we have received no direct response, and you have made no effort to work with us to accommodate our concerns. This work should not wait until after you have provided a redacted report. It should start now.
You have outlined four kinds of information that you plan to redact from this report: grand jury information, classified information, information that may impede an ongoing investigation, and information that may affect the privacy and reputational interests of third parties. We acknowledge that there may be legitimate reasons for withholding some of this information from public view.
As recent precedent makes clear, however, the Department of Justice has no legitimate reason for withholding these materials from Congress. In every other instance where a federal grand jury was used to probe the alleged misconduct of a sitting president—namely, in the Watergate and Starr investigations—the Department of Justice worked with the relevant federal court to release the grand jury information to the House Judiciary Committee. That has not happened in this instance, despite numerous direct requests, nor have you provided us with any legitimate reason for failing to follow the Department’s precedent.
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Read the full letter:
[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.politicususa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2019-04-11-Letter-to-AG-Barr.pdf” title=”2019-04-11 Letter to AG Barr”]
Congress is setting the stage to sue for the Mueller materials
The letter from congressional leaders is the latest step in the march toward what the Trump administration appears to have made into an inevitable legal conflict. Democrats in the House and Senate are going to sue Trump and the DOJ, because there is nothing stopping Trump and Barr from turning over the Mueller materials to the relevant leaders in Congress.
Congress isn’t going away, and they won’t stop until they get the full Mueller materials.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
