House Democrats are intent on getting their hands on the special counsel’s report and are willing to subpoena Robert Mueller to testify before the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff said.
Schiff, who serves as the chairman of the committee, noted Sunday that House Democrats were also willing to subpoena Mueller’s report should Attorney General Bill Barr decide not to disclose its contents.
“We will obviously subpoena the report. We will bring Bob Mueller in to testify before Congress. We will take it to court if necessary,” Schiff told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “And if the President is serious about all his claims of exoneration, then he should welcome the publication of this report.”
Schiff added that the House Intelligence Committee would also take the administration to court if need be, saying “we are going to get to the bottom of this.”
His comments come amid speculation that the special counsel could release his report as early as this week, although a Justice Department official later said the report is not imminent.
In a letter sent Friday to Barr, Schiff and several other Democratic lawmakers made clear to him that they expect the special counsel’s report to be made public.
“After nearly two years of investigation — accompanied by two years of direct attacks on the integrity of the investigation by the president — the public is entitled to know what the Special Counsel has found,” the letter said.
The attorney general had previously noted that he wants to be as “transparent” as possible with Congress and the public, “consistent with the rules and the law.”
He did, however, note that the Justice Department often avoids disclosing “derogatory” information about uncharged individuals, a policy Schiff dismissed, saying that the department broke that standard with their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, which brought no charges, CNN reports.
“The department has violated that policy repeatedly, and extendedly — to a great extent over the last two years,” Schiff said. “I have had this conversation with Rod Rosenstein and others on down at the Justice Department as they turned over thousands and thousands of pages of discovery in the Clinton e-mail investigation and there was no indictment in that investigation, that this was a new precedent they were setting and they were going to have to live by this precedent whether it was a Congress controlled by the Democrats or Republicans.”
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