In the name of transparency, Nancy Pelosi is leading the Democrats’ charge to release Robert Mueller’s report to the public.
The House Speaker is rejecting calls to learn of the report’s contents in a classified briefing to only top lawmakers, saying that the American people “deserve the truth.”
Pelosi rejects classified Mueller briefing
Pelosi made the announcement on a conference call with 120 House Democrats on Saturday, one day after Mueller submitted his final report to Attorney General William Barr. The call came as Democrats reckoned this weekend with the demoralizing news that Mueller found no collusion, leaving them scrambling to figure out their next move.
A person on the call said that Pelosi is pushing “transparency” as the party line, saying that the American people “deserve the truth.”
“The takeaway from this call is that the American [people] deserve the truth,” Pelosi said, according to a person on the call. “Transparency is the order of the day.”
People who were on the call told Politico that Pelosi was concerned that the Justice Department will share Mueller’s findings with only top Democrats and Republicans. That sentiment was shared by all Democrats on the call.
While there is certainly great public interest in Mueller’s report, discretion on what to release ultimately falls with Barr. Typically, prosecution memos for individuals who are investigated but not charged are kept secret according to Justice Department guidelines, in order to protect the reputations of unindicted individuals.
But Democrats on the call — including House Intelligence Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (CA), a top Russiagate peddler who still believes there was collusion — say that they want all documents related to Mueller’s investigation, citing the precedent of Republicans who subpoenaed text messages and other files from the Justice Department in their investigation of the Hillary Clinton email scandal.
Grasping at straws
Still, Democrats seeking Trump’s ouster have few options left other than to wring whatever scandal possible out of a report explicitly vindicating him. After Mueller’s investigation concluded with no evidence of collusion this weekend, Democrats are now fixating on the report’s total disclosure, apparently convinced that evidence of collusion or some other wrongdoing is buried in the report that will open up new avenues to continue investigating the president.
To this end, Democrats have been at pains to portray Republicans as desperate to suppress the Mueller report, presumably in order to perpetuate the impression that Trump is guilty of collusion, obstruction, or some other vague crime that he is eager to hide. But the central charge against Trump was collusion from the start, and Mueller’s vindication of Trump on that count makes it difficult to imagine what Democrats expect to find in the full report that has not already been made public.
“[Democrats] don’t think this Mueller report is going to be the bombshell they all anticipated it was going to be, so now they’re launching all kinds of other charges, all kinds of other investigations,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said.
In a four-page letter to Congress summarizing Mueller’s report on Sunday, Barr wrote that there was no evidence of collusion, and he and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein decided that Trump did not obstruct justice. But after propping up Mueller as an expert who is entitled to the last word on Trump’s guilt for literal years, Democrats are now refusing to accept the result.
Transparency? Not so fast
Indeed, Dems now seem to be doubling down on their partisan attack on Barr, depicting him as complicit in a cover-up of the Mueller report. However, Barr has said he plans to release the report to Congress in April, even as impatient Democrats see signs of foul play in Barr’s decision to exercise the authority given him to handle the sensitive documents.
Meanwhile, as Democrats are seeking to squeeze whatever scandal they possibly can out of an investigation that came up empty — in the name of “transparency” — Republicans like Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) are calling for an investigation into Russiagate’s origins.
It’s time for the tables to turn.
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