Trump Likely to Get a Say Over Mueller Revelations Still Ahead
Trump Likely to Get a Say Over Mueller Revelations Still Ahead
(Bloomberg) -- The next step in Attorney General William Barr’s work on the Mueller report is deciding just how much of it to release, and one person is likely to get a big say in the answer: President Donald Trump.
That’s because Trump and his attorneys could assert executive privilege to block anything deemed sensitive regarding presidential deliberations -- potentially a major stumbling block to the full release of the report being demanded by Democrats.
It’s a quirk of this investigation that Trump plays two roles simultaneously -- subject and likely arbiter of some of what the public gets to see -- and the attorney general is charged with protecting the president’s rights to withhold certain information related to his work.
After Barr released a four-page summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings on Sunday, partisan divisions are sharper than ever. Key Republicans, including Trump, went on the offensive, saying they want to investigate officials from the Obama administration for their role in opening the Russia investigation in the first place.
Democrats’ questions about whether Barr faithfully reported Mueller’s findings -- and whether the attorney general stepped over the line by ruling that Trump didn’t obstruct justice -- grew louder. Six House Democratic committee chairman sent Barr a letter on Monday demanding to see Mueller’s full report by April 2.
The demand promised a bitter partisan fight that could stretch for weeks as Barr weighs a further release.
Barr and his closest aides are already working with Mueller to comb through the special counsel’s report to find sensitive grand jury material that would have to be kept secret, according to a person familiar with the process. Barr isn’t currently planning to share the full report with the White House, the person said.
The attorney general began his task even as Trump told reporters at the White House Monday that unspecified “people” behind the Russia probe would “be looked at.”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham called on Barr to appoint a new special counsel to look into the probe’s origins, a reflection of longstanding Republican assertions that it was fueled early on by anti-Trump bias in the Justice Department and FBI. But he also called for openness about Mueller’s findings.
“My desire is for the public to get as much of the report as possible” except for classified and grand jury information or information subject to executive privilege, Graham told reporters.
Trump’s critics have focused on the findings related to obstruction of justice. Mueller told Barr that he chose not to reach a conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice, saying "while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
Democrats have accused Barr of being biased, citing an unsolicited memo he wrote months before his nomination in which he concluded that Trump couldn’t have obstructed justice if there wasn’t an underlying crime, such as collusion.
Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, cited Barr’s record in saying it is “even more urgent that Congress immediately receive the full report and all the underlying documentation and evidence so that we can make our own determinations.”
Trump’s Lawyers
Trump’s lawyers have long said they expect to review Mueller’s information for executive privilege considerations before Barr reports details to Congress.
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and another White House lawyer, Emmet Flood, who’s overseeing the response to the investigation, would lead any review concerning executive privilege. But Trump has the ultimate authority on deciding what should be off-limits.
During the Mueller investigation, White House lawyers agreed to hand over thousands of pages of documents and allow interviews with dozens of White House aides, but they said they were reserving the right to invoke executive privilege to prevent the details from being released to Congress and the public.
The executive privilege doctrine has been asserted by other presidents who say it’s needed so that they can get confidential and candid advice from their advisers.
Trump, who has exulted in Mueller’s finding that he and his campaign didn’t conspire with Russia, said Monday that “it wouldn’t bother me at all” if the special counsel’s whole report was released.
Authorizing the fullest possible release of Mueller’s findings would let Trump portray himself as being transparent ahead of his 2020 re-election campaign.
But it’s unclear whether Trump would let internal conversations be disclosed, and the White House has shown little interest in cooperating with congressional investigators on related probes.
Staff Interviews
The interviews Mueller’s team conducted with staffers including former White House Counsel Don McGahn and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus could expose unflattering details about Trump and set a precedent for future presidents.
Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal lawyer, said on CNN on Monday that it would be “very inappropriate” to release Trump’s written answers to questions submitted by Mueller last year.
If Trump invokes a broad executive privilege claim, Democrats would be likely to challenge it in court, a lengthy and high-profile battle that could play out through his campaign. The fight could go all the way to the Supreme Court.
During the Obama administration, Republicans waged their own effort to counter executive privilege claims when they were trying to force the Justice Department to turn over communications about a program called Operation Fast and Furious, where the department allowed illegal gun purchases in the U.S. in order to trace the guns to gangs in Mexico.
The GOP-led House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the records and waged a court battle. In January 2016, in something of a split decision, a trial court ruled that the Justice Department had to provide documents for which it hadn’t offered a justification for invoking privilege, but not those withheld for other reasons, including personal privacy and law enforcement sensitivity. The Trump administration released the documents when it took office, and the ruling was never appealed.
Democrat’s Prediction
Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has vowed to continue his investigation into Trump and get the full release of Mueller’s report, taking the president to court if necessary.
“We’re going to move forward with our investigations of obstruction of justice, abuses of power, corruption, to defend the rule of law, which is our job," Nadler said Sunday at a news conference in New York. "It’s a broader mandate than the special prosecutor had.”
Nadler has predicted any effort to suppress Mueller’s report won’t hold up in court. He said a claim of “executive privilege can always be pierced by a specific and legitimate criminal or congressional inquiry.”
John Dean, who was White House counsel to President Richard Nixon -- and became a witness against him in the Watergate scandal -- said it would be an “absurd” legal strategy for the White House to claim executive privilege after having turned over material to Mueller.
Still, Dean said it could be a successful “stalling tactic” that could “tie it up in the lower courts for a couple of years.”
The concept of executive privilege was born out of the Watergate investigations, when Nixon argued that he didn’t have to turn over tapes of his Oval Office conversations to the Watergate special prosecutor.
The decision ultimately went to the Supreme Court, which said the president has a right to some level of executive privilege, but that the need for privacy didn’t override the needs of the judicial process. The Nixon case, though, may not be analogous to Mueller’s report because the tapes were subpoenaed as evidence for a criminal trial and requested by a court, not Congress.
--With assistance from Steven T. Dennis and Billy House.
To contact the reporters on this story: Shannon Pettypiece in Washington at spettypiece@bloomberg.net;Chris Strohm in Washington at cstrohm1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert
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