The House Judiciary Committee is going “way over the top” with the terms of this week’s hearing with Attorney General William Barr, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Monday.
Barr is set to testify about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees this week, but his appearance before the House panel is in jeopardy over a disagreement about the parameters.
In an interview with Fox News, Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said his counterpart in the House, Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., is going too far by demanding Barr be subject not only to member questions but also queries from each party’s counsel in a second round of questioning.
With the Justice Department warning Nadler that Barr could back out of the hearing, Graham said, “I can understand his concern.”
“What the House is doing is way over the top. Mueller is the final word on this,” Graham said. “I fought like hell to make sure Mueller could do his job without interference. I introduced legislation so that he couldn’t be fired without cause.”
“Mueller said [@realDonaldTrump didn’t collude.] This is over. This is political revenge. The House is on a witch hunt, truly a witch hunt, to make something out of nothing.” – @LindseyGrahamSC
Graham denounces the extremes House Dems are trying to go in AG Barr’s interview. pic.twitter.com/UU8Gw355Gu
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) April 30, 2019
Noting how Mueller found no conspiracy between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Kremlin, Graham added, “This is political revenge. The House is on a witch hunt — truly a witch hunt to try to make something out of nothing.”
Trump often called Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt.”
Barr released a four-page summary of Mueller’s report last month, days after the special counsel investigation came to a close, which said Mueller did not find evidence of conspiracy. The summary also took a partial quote from Mueller that said he did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice. Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein determined no such crime had been committed.
Barr’s summary has come under heavy scrutiny. Following the redacted release of Mueller’s report, the New York Times published an analytical piece comparing excerpts from Barr’s summary to Mueller’s findings. Critics have slammed Barr’s decision to hold a press conference as a ploy to spin the special counsel’s findings and pointed to instances in the past in which he wrote summaries they view as obscuring the truth.
Democrats have rallied around the report, which lays out nearly a dozen instances of possible obstruction of justice and signals the question should be left up to Congress to answer, as a cornerstone for more investigations into the president.
Barr is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.
Despite Barr’s opposition to answering counsel questions, Nadler is moving ahead with the plan.
“The witness is not going to tell the committee how to conduct its hearing, period,” Nadler told CNN on Sunday. If Barr does not comply, Nadler said, “Then we will have to subpoena him, and we will have to use whatever means we can to enforce the subpoena.”
