Amid White House defiance, U.S. House panel weighs holding Barr in contempt

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Democratic-led U.S. congressional panel met on Wednesday to vote on holding Attorney General William Barr in contempt over his refusal to comply with a subpoena seeking an unredacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry report while the White House took a key step in defiance.

The White House said President Donald Trump planned to assert executive privilege is declining to turn over the full Mueller report. Executive privilege is a right claimed by presidents to withhold information about internal executive branch deliberations from other branches of government.

Democrats condemned the White House action.

“Besides misapplying the doctrine of executive privilege, since the White House waived these privileges long ago and the (Justice) Department seemed open to sharing these materials with us just yesterday, this decision represents a clear escalation in the Trump administration’s blanket defiance of Congress’s constitutionally mandated duties,” House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said.

As part of a intensifying showdown between Democrats in Congress and Republican President Donald Trump, Nadler held a committee meeting on holding Barr in contempt. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a Washington Post interview earlier on Wednesday, agreed that Barr, the top U.S. law enforcement official, should be held in contempt.

Trump is stonewalling numerous investigations by the Democrats, who control the House, of his administration, family and business interests, with court action likely to follow.

The Judiciary Committee was slated to vote on a resolution recommending that the full House find Barr in contempt of Congress, even as committee staffers and Justice Department officials worked behind the scenes in the hopes of a deal to avert such action.

“The American people see through Chairman Nadler’s desperate ploy to distract from the President’s historically successful agenda and our booming economy. Neither the White House nor Attorney General Barr will comply with Chairman Nadler’s unlawful and reckless demands,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sander said.

Nadler blasted the department for abruptly breaking off “good faith negotiations” to invoke such privilege and said its legal arguments lacked “credibility, merit, or legal or factual basis.”

Barr last month released a 448-page redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his 22-month investigation into Russian election meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Nadler subpoenaed the full document and all underlying evidence, saying the material was necessary for lawmakers to determine whether Trump obstructed justice by trying to impede the Mueller probe. Barr missed two subpoena deadlines for turning over the material, the latest on Monday.

“We remain unanimously determined on our side of the aisle to get the unredacted report, as we’ve demanded,” Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat on Nadler’s committee, told reporters.

Representative Doug Collins, the panel’s ranking Republican, criticized Nadler in a statement late on Tuesday for rejecting Justice officials’ “accommodations,” and praised “the department’s endurance.”

The House, then controlled by Republicans, voted in 2012 to hold Eric Holder, attorney general under Democratic President Barack Obama, in contempt for failing to turn over subpoenaed Justice Department documents about a gun-running investigation called Operation Fast and Furious. It was the first time that Congress had held the top U.S. law enforcement official or any Cabinet member in contempt.

The redacted Mueller report details extensive contacts between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Moscow as well as the campaign’s expectation of benefiting from Russia’s actions. But Mueller said there was not sufficient evidence to show a criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the campaign. The report also describes a series of actions Trump took to try to impede Mueller’s investigation.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration stymied a separate effort by House Judiciary Committee Democrats to subpoena records from former White House counsel Don McGahn, directing him not to provide the documents sought by the panel.

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Mueller’s report said McGahn told investigators that Trump unsuccessfully pressured him to remove Mueller and then asked him to deny that Trump had done so. The accounts are based partly on the documents sought by House Democrats.

The Trump administration has refused to cooperate with congressional probes in at least a half-dozen instances, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s decision on Monday to deny a request for Trump’s tax returns from the Democratic chairman of the House tax committee.

Reporting by David Morgan; additional reporting by Richard Cowan and Susan Heavey; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Bernadette Baum

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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