House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler Sunday warned President Trump against attempting to assert executive privilege to block the release of portions of the Mueller report.
Appearing on “Meet the Press” two days after special counsel Robert Mueller turned in his final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to the Justice Department, Nadler argued that the White House won’t be able to hide behind the power of the presidency if there are damaging findings in the report.
“It’s critical that everything in that report and the underlying evidence be public, be open to the American people. That transparency is key. America needs answers as to what’s been going on,” Rep. Nadler, D-N.Y., said.
“As we learned from the Nixon tapes case, executive privilege cannot be used to hide wrongdoing.”
A battle over executive privilege, the right of the president to shield certain information, could be the next flashpoint in the battle surrounding the Mueller probe.
All eyes are now on Attorney General William Barr, who is tasked with analyzing the report and deciding what portions of it can be shared with Congress and ultimately the public. He’s expected to deliver those characterizations as soon as Sunday.
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Democrats have made clear that they want the entire report, as well as the underlying documents that support it, to be made public.
And while he’s been critical of the special counsel’s probe and Mueller’s entire team for months, Trump said last week he wants the report to be made public.
But executive privilege has been a major source of contention between the White House and Congress in past administrations. So it’s possible that the Trump administration could try to block the release of some portion of the report.
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio agreed with the broad call for transparency on Sunday.
He argued that while some intelligence information would obviously need to be redacted, his message to Trump is to “lean toward transparency” in order to to help the country move forward after the report’s release. And he added that transparency would also help the public understand the legal rational for starting the investigation in the first place.
“Let’s put all of that out there as well so we can pass judgment about how the investigation was conducted, or at least a predicate for the investigation was conducted during the Obama years,” Rubio said on an appearance on “Meet the Press”
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