The House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed the Justice Department on Wednesday for special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report and underlying intelligence materials.
Unlike in the House Judiciary Committee, which also subpoenaed for the report, this effort is bipartisan, and according to House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has a better shot at making headway.
Schiff and ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., wrote in a letter to Attorney General William Barr that after “bipartisan overtures and multiple, unreciprocated efforts” to reach a reasonable accommodation for the documents, they were left with “no choice but to serve the attached subpoena for those materials.”
They set a deadline of May 15. Schiff waved the prospect of contempt in a statement that said if DOJ “continues to ignore or rejects our requests, we will enforce our request in Congress and, if necessary, the courts.”
The pair have tried for weeks to gain access to the full, unredacted report from Mueller, as well as intelligence and counterintelligence information gathered by the special counsel, including “information regarding efforts by the Russian government to contact Americans in furtherance of Russian intelligence operations.”
During an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday, Schiff said the committee has not been briefed on the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation since FBI Director James Comey was fired in May 2017. He also touted the “unity” between himself and Nunes and said their bipartisan effort may be the Democrats’ best hope for obtaining the full Mueller report.
“I think we both recognize … they must comply,” said “It’s going to be a lot more difficult in respect to our request for the administration to say this just a Democratic partisan thing when you do have both members who are otherwise in strong disagreement about the Russia investigation uniting around this demand for information.”
The House Judiciary Committee voted to cite Barr for contempt of Congress on Wednesday, but did so along party lines. Republicans voted against the contempt resolution, arguing Democrats are seeking to drag out the Mueller probe, which found no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians, but made no determination about whether Trump tried to obstruct the investigation.
The vote came after the Trump administration asserted executive privilege on the materials from the unreleased Mueller investigation.
