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Anonymous ID: 812445 April 19, 2019, 6:31 a.m. No.6238493   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>8502 >>8746 >>8843

Mueller report: House issues subpoena for full unredacted version

 

House judiciary chairman, Jerry Nadler, on Friday issued a subpoena for the full, unredacted report by special counsel Robert Mueller on Russian interference in the 2016 US election and the Trump campaign.

The subpoena seeks not only the “complete and unredacted” report, but also all of the underlying documents referenced in it including grand jury evidence. The New York Democrat said on Good Morning America that the information was necessary “to make informed decisions” on what happens next.

Nadler’s committee, which has the power to launch impeachment proceedings, voted in early April to authorize the subpoena for the report after attorney general William Barr outlined the categories he intended to shield.

The subpoena came as Democrats vowed to continue investigating Donald Trump a day after the report was made public, revealing striking new details about the president’s effort to thwart a federal inquiry he believed threatened his presidency.

 

Shortly after a redacted version of the exhaustive report was released to the public on Thursday, Nadler said it outlined “disturbing evidence that President Trump engaged in obstruction of justice” and the “responsibility now falls to Congress to hold the president accountable for his actions.”

The 448-page summary of Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation concluded without reaching a verdict on whether the president illegally obstructed justice. But the report catalogues nearly a dozen instances in which Trump attempts to stop the investigation, narrow its scope or influence witnesses involved in the inquiry. Mueller cited legal constraints which prevent the justice department from charging a sitting president with obstruction of justice – and suggested a final say on the matter may lie with Congress.

In a letter to colleagues, Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi cited the passage and declared: “Congress will not be silent.”

Republicans viscerally disagreed with the assessment that Congress should pick up where Mueller left off.

“Democrats want to keep searching for imaginary evidence that supports their claims, but it is simply not there,” said House minority leader Kevin McCarthy. “It is time to move on.”

 

But far from turning the page on the investigation, Democrats are opening a new, bitterly partisan chapter. Facing them now is an issue that has already sharply divided the party along ideological and generation lines: impeachment.

Democratic leaders see more risk than reward in initiating an impeachment inquiry, especially after Mueller said he found “insufficient evidence” to conclude that Trump conspired with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Without that support, Republicans are unlikely to break with the president, as they did with Richard Nixon after Watergate.

“Unless [there’s] a bipartisan conclusion, an impeachment would be doomed to failure,” the House intelligence committee chairman, Adam Schiff, said on CNN. “I continue to think that a failed impeachment is not in the national interest.”

A partisan endeavor could risk repeating what Democrats widely view as a historic overreach by Republicans, when they pursued impeachment against Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. Democrats fear that a divisive and unpopular impeachment battle would galvanize Trump’s supporters – as it did for Clinton 21 years ago - and would swamp the party’s policy agenda that they believe is crucial to unseating Trump in the 2020 election and holding onto their majority in the House of Representatives.

Still, if the House did move forward with articles of impeachment, every Senate Democrat and 20 Senate Republicans would have to vote to remove Trump from office – an unlikely scenario at this stage.

 

The House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, told CNN that impeachment was “not worthwhile” with a presidential election 18 months away. Nadler said that impeachment hearings were “one possibility” but that it was “too early” to discuss it.

“We will have to go follow the evidence where it leads,” he said. “And I don’t know exactly where it will lead.”

But in a sign that the issue is far from settled, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most vocal and high-profile members of Congress, said she would sign on to an impeachment proposal offered by her fellow freshman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

“While I understand the political reality of the Senate + election considerations, upon reading this DoJ report, which explicitly names Congress in determining obstruction, I cannot see a reason for us to abdicate from our constitutionally mandated responsibility to investigate,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a series of tweets explaining her decision.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/19/mueller-report-democrats-investigate-subpoena