Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder claimed Friday that any “competent” prosecutor would be able to make a successful obstruction of justice case against President Trump based on the findings outlined in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
“ANY competent public corruption prosecutor would bring obstruction charges against Trump/and win. Only reason Mueller did not was because of the flawed DOJ [Justice Department] restriction against indicting a sitting President. He said so (below). Congress now has a constitutional responsibility,” Holder wrote on Twitter.
Holder’s remarks come after the Justice Department on Thursday released the long-awaited report, with redactions, which specifies the two-year Russia investigation and details how the team found no evidence of collusion involving the Trump campaign before the 2016 election.
Mueller laid out ten episodes in which President Trump directed others to influence or curtail the Russia investigation after the special counsel’s appointment in May 2017.
“With respect to whether the President can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice,” the 448-page report reads.
Team Mueller said those efforts “were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on Friday issued a subpoena for Mueller’s report as Congress escalates its investigation of President Donald Trump.
“It now falls to Congress to determine the full scope of that alleged misconduct and to decide what steps we must take going forward,” the New York Democrat said in a statement.
He expects the Justice Department to comply by May 1.
The Justice Department responded to the move by stating the subpoena issued by House Democrats for the full report is unnecessary.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.