House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on Friday issued a subpoena to Attorney General William Barr for an unredacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
“I have issued a subpoena to the Department of Justice for the full version of the Mueller report and the underlying evidence. The Department is required to comply with that subpoena by May 1,” Nadler said in a statement.
Nadler added that he was “open to working with the Department to reach a reasonable accommodation for access to these materials, however I cannot accept any proposal which leaves most of Congress in the dark, as they grapple with their duties of legislation, oversight and constitutional accountability.”
Barr on Thursday said he would make available to a bipartisan group of leaders from several Congressional committees a version of the report with all redactions removed except those relating to grand-jury information that cannot by law be shared. He wrote:
My Committee needs and is entitled to the full version of the report and the underlying evidence consistent with past practice. The redactions appear to be significant. We have so far seen none of the actual evidence that the Special Counsel developed to make this case. Even the redacted version of the report outlines serious instances of wrongdoing by President Trump and some of his closest associates. 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 report showed that the Special Counsel did not establish evidence of a criminal conspiracy by the Trump campaign to collude with Russia, and that there was no determination made on the whether President Trump obstructed justice.
Mueller’s report, under current Justice Department guidelines, went solely to Barr, but Democrats are arguing that Mueller meant to leave it up to Congress to decide whether the president obstructed justice.