Key Democrat says Mueller report summary puts matters ‘squarely in Congress’ court’
Democrats are pushing for continued investigation and transparency after the Mueller report, while Republicans are declaring vindication for President Trump.
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said Sunday that the release of a summary of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings on Russian interference in the 2016 campaign means that the next step is now up to lawmakers.
“Seems like the Department of Justice is putting matters squarely in Congress’ court,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in a tweet.
Republicans swiftly declared victory after the summary’s release, with Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, stating that “the cloud hanging over President Trump has been removed by this report” and calling for the country to “move on.”
“Good day for the rule of law. Great day for President Trump and his team. No collusion and no obstruction,” Graham said in a statement. “Bad day for those hoping the Mueller investigation would take President Trump down.”
Mueller submitted a confidential report Friday to Attorney General William P. Barr, who reviewed the document and sent congressional leaders a summary of Mueller’s “principal conclusions” late Sunday afternoon.
At one point in the four-page summary, Barr quotes Mueller: “While the report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Rep. Douglas A. Collins (Ga.), the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said Barr’s report showed there “was no collusion between Russia and Donald Trump or his campaign,” and he sought to preempt Democrats’ calls for more details of Mueller’s report to be released.
“Democrats wrote the regulations that now govern how he handles Mr. Mueller’s report, and he appears to be complying with those regulations,” Collins said, defending Barr’s summary of the more than 22-month investigation.
Collins also encouraged Nadler to drop his probe into the president: “Chairman Nadler has the chance to rethink his sprawling investigation, which retreads ground already covered by the special counsel and is already a matter of public record. . . . Today, I ask Chairman Nadler to join us in abandoning the divisiveness that Russia prizes and prioritizing the unity that has always made America stronger than our enemies.”
Earlier Sunday, Democrats maintained that it was too early to raise the specter of impeaching Trump but suggested that they are keeping their options open, while Republicans fired back that Democrats would probably move to impeach the president no matter what.
On the Sunday morning news shows, Nadler said it is “way too early to speculate” about impeachment. He said he still believes Trump obstructed justice, although “whether they’re criminal obstructions is another question.”
“What Congress has to do is look at a broader picture. We have the responsibility of protecting the rule of law . . . so that our democratic institutions are not greatly damaged by this president,” Nadler said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
He maintained that members of the Trump team colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. “We know there was collusion. Why there’s been no indictments, we don’t know,” Nadler said.
Democrats will “try to negotiate, we’ll try everything else first,” but if they have to, they will issue subpoenas and are “absolutely” willing to go to the Supreme Court if necessary, Nadler said.
Asked how long they are willing to wait for the Justice Department to provide the full Mueller report, he replied, “It won’t be months.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) quickly seized on Nadler’s comments, arguing on CNN that they show Democrats are “immediately pivoting away” from the report and plan to move ahead with plans to impeach Trump no matter what.
“They fully intend to impeach the president,” Cruz said. “What they’re basically saying is they’re going to impeach the president for being Donald Trump.”
In an interview with The Washington Post this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said impeachment would be “so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path.”
“He’s just not worth it,” she said of Trump.
Other Democrats on Sunday joined Nadler in renewing their calls for the Mueller report to be made public.
On ABC News’s “This Week,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) reiterated that there was “significant evidence of collusion.”
Responding to Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani’s tweet Saturday that Schiff should “apologize for his mistake” in asserting that there was collusion, Schiff said, “Giuliani would be wise to wait until the report is made public” before making such claims.
“If they’re so confident that the report is going to exonerate them, they should fight to make the report public,” the Democrat said. “I suspect we’ll find those words of transparency hollow.”
Schiff said he believed Mueller’s team erred in relying on written responses from the president, rather than an interview, because those generally reflect “more what the lawyer has to say than what the individual has to say.” “The president is someone who seems pathologically incapable of telling the truth for long periods of time,” Schiff added.
On CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the Mueller report should be released in full so that Americans can draw their own informed conclusions about Trump.
“The American people deserve to know whether Donald Trump is either a) a legitimate president, b) a Russian asset, c) the functional equivalent of an organized crime boss or d) just a useful idiot who happens to have been victimized by the greatest collection of coincidences in the history of the republic,” said Jeffries, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House.
In an appearance on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” Nadler said Democrats are prepared to fight back if the Trump administration seeks to use executive privilege to block the report’s release.
“The president must personally assert executive privilege,” Nadler said. “And I do not believe it exists here at all because, as we learned from the Nixon tapes case, executive privilege cannot be used to hide wrongdoing.”
Nadler also said on “Fox News Sunday” that any attempt by the administration to prevent the delivery of the full report to Congress would amount to a “coverup.”
He emphasized that regardless of the findings in the special counsel’s report, Trump campaign officials colluded “in plain sight” with Russia during the election.
Nadler cited a meeting at Trump Tower that Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and campaign chairman Paul Manafort attended with a Russian lawyer with the aim of receiving dirt on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. He also noted the revelation that Manafort gave political targeting data to a Ukrainian political consultant who U.S. authorities have alleged is an agent of the Russian government.
“Regardless of the special counsel’s findings, wrongdoing had already been made public . . . Maybe it’s not indictable, but we know there is collusion. And the question is to what degree and for what purpose,” Nadler said.
Some Republicans on Sunday also called for Mueller’s report to be released to the public while also seizing on the lack of indictments as vindication of Trump.
Cruz said on “State of the Union” that the full report “absolutely” needs to be given to Congress and made public in the interest of transparency.
Collins said Sunday that the facts of the Mueller report will most likely show that there was no collusion.
On “Fox News Sunday,” he accused Democratic lawmakers of abusing power by continuing sweeping investigations into Trump.
“They really don’t have a policy agenda,” Collins said. “They have an agenda against the president. They have an agenda to win 2020.”
The ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), said on “This Week” that Democrats had asserted that Mueller was “right next to Jesus and can walk on water” but that “all indications are that there’s not going to be any finding of any collusion whatsoever.”
Democrats are pushing for other hearings and investigations, Jordan said, because “they don’t think this Mueller report is going to be the bombshell they all anticipated it would be.”
“This is how the Democrats are going to operate,” he said. “We just have to be used to it.”
Jordan said he was all “for erring on the side of transparency.” But asked whether he would urge Trump to release the full report, he replied, “That’s the president’s call.”
Drew Harwell, Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.
