Special Counsel Robert Mueller has wrapped up his investigation without issuing any new indictments — but Nancy Pelosi still isn’t happy.
The House speaker said over the weekend that she simply won’t accept a classified summary of the special counsel’s conclusions. She wants Mueller’s full, unredacted report — and she wants it to be public.
Addressing 120 members of the Democratic caucus in a Saturday afternoon conference call, Pelosi assured her colleagues that she will deny Attorney General William Barr any opportunity to present the special counsel’s findings in a closed-door setting.
Pelosi posturing
Democrats want to see a complete and unredacted final report delivered to Congress immediately. That way, House investigators can use any unexplored lead — or any underlying evidence suggesting even a hint of possible misconduct — to open new inquiries into the 2016 Trump campaign team.
Barr received Mueller’s full report on Friday, and he sent a letter to bipartisan leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees the following day, vowing to seek “as much transparency as possible.”
Justice Department procedure only requires the attorney general to notify “the Chairman and Ranking Minority Member of the Judiciary Committees of each House of Congress” upon “conclusion of the Special Counsels [sic] investigation.” Still, Barr announced that he would share the report’s “principal conclusions” with the committee chairs as early as this weekend, a promise that he kept on Sunday afternoon.
An unthinkable demand
Despite this courtesy, Pelosi warned fellow Democrats on Saturday in a “Dear Colleague” letter that Barr’s offer “to provide the Committees with a summary of the report’s conclusions is insufficient.”
“Congress requires the full report and the underlying documents so that the Committees can proceed with their independent work, including oversight and legislating to address any issues the Mueller report may raise,” she wrote.
In other words: Pelosi wants the full report, and she wants it now. But Barr would be violating long-standing DOJ policy if he were to indulge the House speaker.
Special counsel provisions state that any public release of information “shall be governed by the generally applicable Departmental guidelines concerning public comment with respect to any criminal investigation.” This includes the Justice Department’s longstanding protocol of not releasing negative information about people who aren’t indicted.
To prevent the politicization of evidence gathered during Mueller’s 23-month investigation, the attorney general has a duty to keep the most inflammatory information under wraps. Otherwise, Pelosi and company could weaponize this intelligence and use it to discredit Trump.
The witch hunt continues
Yet, this is precisely what Democrats hope to accomplish by calling for the immediate and full disclosure of the Mueller report. “Right now, we are in the mode wanting to know the truth, wanting the facts so that our chairpersons and members of the committees can take a look into this going forward,” Pelosi told fellow Democrats on Saturday.
Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-MD) was even more transparent about the Democratic strategy to pressure Barr into going against DOJ policy by releasing all of the unproven information in the case. He admitted that the Mueller report would supply Democrats with all of the evidentiary fuel they need to keep their committee hearings going well into the 2020 election season.
“We will be in a position as soon as we get the report and underlying evidence to make the judgment about where we need to go in terms of a number of different live investigations,” Raskin said. “Some matters might be resolved by what is learned on the report, some matters might be rendered moot, other matters might be opened up for greater investigation.”
Even now, as Congress awaits a full report of the special counsel’s conclusions, Democrats are saying that they will proceed with their own investigations no matter what Mueller uncovered.
“The Mueller report is one document; it is not, however, the final word on ongoing investigations, criminal or otherwise,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-VA), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. “There is a lot that falls beyond the jurisdiction of Robert S. Mueller III which the Congress is involved in — and some other investigative bodies, like the Southern District of New York and the attorney general of New York… So the fact that Mueller [is finished] does not in any way circumscribe the ongoing work of the Congress.”
Despite posturing from Pelosi, the attorney general must follow departmental guidelines that were established to keep partisanship out of the Justice Department. Otherwise, left unchecked, the Democratic Party will spend the next 18 months dragging the president’s name through the mud.
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