Justice agrees to release key evidence to Congress
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department, after weeks of tense negotiations, has agreed to provide Congress with key evidence collected by Robert Mueller that House Judiciary Committee members said could shed light on possible obstruction of justice and abuse of power by President Trump, the House Judiciary Committee said Monday.
The exact scope of the material the Justice Department has agreed to provide was not immediately clear, but the committee signaled that it was a breakthrough after weeks of wrangling over those materials and others that the Judiciary panel demanded under subpoena.
The announcement appeared to provide a rationale for House Democrats’ choice, announced last week, to back away from threats to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress. The House will still proceed Tuesday with a vote to empower the Judiciary Committee to take Barr to court to fully enforce its subpoena, but even that may no longer be necessary, the panel’s leader said.
“We have agreed to allow the department time to demonstrate compliance with this agreement. If the Department proceeds in good faith and we are able to obtain everything that we need, then there will be no need to take further steps,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the committee chairman, said in a statement.
Nadler said all members of the committee would be able to view the material privately.
The agreement appears to have been foreshadowed in an exchange of letters in recent weeks between the committee and the department. In a May 24 letter outlining a proposed compromise, Nadler wrote that he was “prepared to prioritize production of materials that would provide the committee with the most insight into certain incidents when the special counsel found ‘substantial evidence’ of obstruction of justice.”
Those incidents include Trump’s attempts to fire Mueller, the special counsel; his request that Don McGahn, the former White House counsel, create “a fraudulent record denying that incident”; and Trump’s efforts to get former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to undo his recusal and curtail the scope of the special counsel inquiry.
After weeks of objections, the Justice Department said it found the proposal reasonable and would work with the committee to share the materials in question, but only if the House would back off holding Barr in contempt of Congress for his defiance of the subpoena in question.
News of the deal came just hours before the committee convened the first of a series of hearings focused on the findings of Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation.
Because the Trump administration has blocked relevant witnesses from testifying, Monday’s session starred John Dean, a former White House counsel who turned against President Richard Nixon during the Watergate affair, and former federal prosecutors, who assessed the implications of the special counsel’s findings. The testimony was limited to the contents of Mueller’s 448-page report already voluntarily made public by Barr.