WHITE HOUSE SEEKS TO BLOCK RELEASE OF MUELLER SECRETS
Lawmakers want access to material from grand jury
WASHINGTON
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to block Congress from seeing grand jury secrets gathered in the Russia investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller, saying the executive branch would suffer irreparable harm if lawmakers see the evidence.
Noel Francisco, the solicitor general, asked the justices to halt an order by a federal appeals court that imposed a May 11 deadline on the Justice Department to turn over the evidence to the House Judiciary Committee. He said the Justice Department should first get a chance to fully litigate an appeal of the ruling before the Supreme Court.
“The government will suffer irreparable harm absent a stay. Once the government discloses the secret grand jury records, their secrecy will irrevocably be lost,” Francisco wrote, adding, “That is particularly so when, as here, they are disclosed to a congressional committee and its staff.”
House Democrats have argued that they need to see the grand jury evidence in part because of suspicions that President Donald Trump may have lied under oath in his written answers to Mueller, including about his campaign’s advance knowledge of and contacts with Wikileaks about its possession of hacked Democratic emails and plans to publish them.
But under Attorney General William Barr, the Justice Department has fought to prevent House investigators from seeing the grand jury material, including information that was blacked out in the report on the Mueller investigation it released last year and underlying testimony transcripts those passages derived from.
Usually, Congress has no right to view grand jury evidence. But in 1974, the courts permitted lawmakers to see such materials as they weighed whether to impeach President Richard Nixon. Last summer, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed whether to impeach Trump, it sought a judicial order to see certain Mueller grand jury materials, too.
The politically charged fight turns on a technical legal issue: whether the impeachment process counts as a “judicial proceeding” under an exception to grand jury secrecy rules that permits sharing evidence for that purpose.