The Supreme Court granted a request from House Democrats to cancel the December hearing before the high court related to their pursuit of secretive grand jury materials underlying special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. The move from Democrats to back off from the high-profile clash with the Justice Department next month signals that they might drop the case entirely after President-elect Joe Biden takes office and a new Congress is seated in January.
“The motion of respondent to remove the case from the December 2020 argument calendar is granted,” a short order from the Supreme Court noted on Friday.
The high court granted a petition for a writ of certiorari (or a review of the case) in July after the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to review the case, in which the Trump administration seeks to overturn an appeals court ruling ordering it to deliver the grand jury materials redacted within and underlying the Mueller report to Congress. The Democrats filed their brief with the Supreme Court in mid-October.
Both the Democrats and the Justice Department made submissions last week.
“Since the Committee filed its brief, the Presidential election has been held and Joseph R. Biden, Jr. has been projected to receive more than a sufficient number of the electoral votes needed to be elected as the 46th President of the United States. The Committee’s investigations into misconduct by President Trump, oversight of agency activities during the Trump Administration, and consideration of related legislative reforms have remained ongoing,” Democratic House Judiciary Committee General Counsel Douglas Letter wrote on Tuesday. “But a new Congress will convene in the first week of January 2021, and President-elect Biden will be inaugurated on January 20, 2021. Once those events occur, the newly constituted Committee will have to determine whether it wishes to continue pursuing the application for the grand-jury materials that gave rise to this case.”
The Justice Department said on Thursday that it was prepared for the December hearing but was OK with whatever the high court decided to do.
Mueller’s 448-page report, released in April 2019, said the Russians interfered in 2016 in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.” The special counsel also laid out 10 possible instances of Trump obstructing justice but did not reach a conclusion. Attorney General William Barr and Rod Rosenstein, who was deputy attorney general at the time, concluded Trump had not obstructed justice.
Parts of the report have since been unredacted in bits and pieces, but not all of it.
House Democrats filed the original lawsuit in July 2019, arguing that grand jury secrecy should not apply because they need it as part of a possible impeachment investigation into Trump. Much of the debate has centered on whether a Senate impeachment trial can be considered a “judicial proceeding.”
“The Framers made impeachment a cornerstone of our Constitution’s system of checks and balances. … The question presented here is whether, in fulfilling that essential constitutional function, the House of Representatives is categorically barred from reviewing the type of grand-jury material that is available for use in ordinary civil and criminal litigation,” Democrats told the high court last month. “The text of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6 makes clear that the answer is no. Rule 6(e)(3)(E)(i) authorizes the disclosure of grand-jury material preliminarily to a ‘judicial proceeding.’ An impeachment trial falls squarely within the plain meaning of that term.”
Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall said in November that “the [House Judiciary] Committee’s belated embrace of ‘the plain meaning of judicial proceeding’ is a welcome shift, even if the Committee does not really mean it” in his response to the Supreme Court.
“Having subtly broadened the term beyond its ordinary meaning, the Committee amasses extensive evidence that the Senate’s role in impeachment has been described in judicial-sounding terms from the Constitution forward. That is undoubtedly true: impeachment proceedings have a judicial character, and accordingly terms like ‘court’ are sometimes used in an atypical sense to describe them,” the DOJ lawyer said. “But that is not the ordinary meaning of those terms. And it is certainly not the usual understanding of a ‘judicial proceeding,’ which is something that happens in a court of law presided over by a judge exercising only judicial power. Simply put, even when it tries impeachments, the United States Senate is not a ‘court of justice’ that holds ‘judicial proceedings’ governed by laws like Rule 6(e).”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a 2-1 decision in March, ruling that the grand jury materials are court records, not DOJ records, that historically have been released to Congress in the course of impeachment investigations. The appeals court upheld a U.S. District Court’s October 2019 ruling that House investigators should be given access to the material.
Trump faced a Ukraine-related impeachment investigation last year, and the Democratic-led House impeached him on Dec. 18, 2019, over charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The GOP-controlled Senate acquitted the president on Feb. 5. But Democrats signaled long after that there could be a second round of impeachment.
The House Judiciary Committee told the Supreme Court in May that it needed the records to decide whether to impeach Trump over his alleged obstruction of the Russia investigation or for some other reason in the future, but it never did. It is now possible that the case will be dropped entirely.
