House Dems threaten to hold Barr in contempt
WASHINGTON — House Democrats’ feud with Attorney General William Barr boiled over Thursday when Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, accused the nation’s top law enforcement official of lying to lawmakers, and the Judiciary Committee threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress if he did not relent and promptly hand over a complete version of Robert Mueller’s report and evidence.
The escalation between the two branches of government, a day after Barr mounted an aggressive defense of himself in the Senate, was as abrupt and emotionally charged as any in decades. It left Democrats seeking to investigate President Trump and his associates in an even more difficult position as they try to persuade the Trump administration to hand over material they say they need to hold the president to account.
Tensions were already running high before Pelosi’s remarks. The Justice Department declined Wednesday to provide the materials the Judiciary Committee had demanded under subpoena, and Thursday morning Barr himself failed to appear at another hearing on Mueller’s findings because of a dispute over who would be allowed to ask him questions.
But it was a newly revealed letter from Mueller to the attorney general in which he took Barr to task for the way he had initially summarized his findings that most provoked Pelosi’s ire. The communication appeared to undercut Barr’s claims at an April 9 House hearing that he was not aware of any such discontent.
“What is deadly serious about it is the attorney general of the United States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States,” Pelosi told reporters. “That’s a crime.”
The Justice Department and Republicans on Capitol Hill fired back at the speaker. Kerri Kupec, a department spokeswoman, called Pelosi’s comments a “baseless attack” as well as “reckless, irresponsible and false.”
The calls for Barr to be held in contempt of Congress stem not from Mueller’s letter but from the Justice Department’s decision not to honor the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena to see Mueller’s report without redactions and all the evidence his investigators collected. In a letter to lawmakers, the department said that sharing the information would put the integrity of its investigations at risk, but Democrats were not ready to accept that answer.
Convening in a nearly empty hearing room despite his absence, the Judiciary Committee’s chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., called on Republicans to join Democrats in standing up for the rights of Congress against an administration that he said was systematically thwarting its constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the executive branch.
But mostly he trained his ire at the attorney general, who objected to Nadler’s insistence that staff lawyers be allowed to ask questions at the hearing.
“We will have no choice but to move quickly to hold the attorney general in contempt if he stalls or fails to negotiate in good faith,” he said. “But the attorney general must make a choice. Every one of us must make the same choice. That choice is now an obligation of our office. The choice is simple: We can stand up to this president in defense of the country and the Constitution we love, or we can let the moment pass us by.”