House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said Sunday that there was collusion in the 2016 election and vowed Democrats will continue their investigation as to whether President Donald Trump or anyone on his campaign team worked with Russia.
‘We know a lot of things and maybe it’s not indictable, but we know there was collusion,’ he said on ‘Fox News Sunday.’
‘If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, you shouldn’t sully their name,’ he added.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said there was collusion in the 2016 election and vowed to continue the congressional investigation
President Donald Trump reads a newspaper on his way to his Trump International Golf Course on Sunday morning
Nadler pointed to the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016 when then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner met with a lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who claimed to have information on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
‘We know that the president’s son and campaign manager were involved in a meeting with the Russians to receive stolen – what they thought was to receive information stolen from the Russians by the Democratic National Committee, as part of the Russian government attempt to help Trump in the election. That’s the way the e-mail inviting them to the meeting put it,’ he said on CNN’s ‘State of the Union.’
He conceded none of what he cited has resulted in indictments from the special counsel.
‘No, it hasn’t, as far as we know. But we know there was collusion. Why there’s been no indictments, we don’t know. Let me say further, we know a number of things. We know what I just said,’ he said.
He also referred to former FBI director James Comey’s allegation that President Trump asked him to ease off a federal investigation of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and his meetings with Russian officials.
‘We know that the president pressured the FBI to go easy, to stop investigating Flynn and various other people. We know that he fired the FBI director, as he put it to NBC, to take care of the Russian thing, in order to stop the investigation of various people associated with him. We know that he concocted the lie about the purpose of that Russian meeting. We know that a lot of his top associates have been indicted and convicted, and we know that he has engaged in a relentless two-year attack against the FBI, various law enforcement agencies,’ Nader argued.
Nadler also argued that while it is Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting president, if Trump did do something wrong then it was up to Congress to hold him accountable.
‘The Justice Department believes that as a matter of law, the president, no matter what the evidence, can never be indicted,’ Nadler said. ‘If that is the case then they can’t hold him accountable and the only institution that can hold the president accountable is Congress and Congress, therefore, needs the evidence in the information,’ he said on ‘Fox News Sunday.
He added: ‘The special counsel was looking and can only look for crimes. We have to protect the rule of law. We have to look for abuses of power. We have to look for obstructions of justice, we have to look for corruption in the exercise of power, which may not be crimes. They may be, but they may not be crimes. We have a much broader mandate and we have to exercise that mandate to protect the integrity of government and protect the integrity of liberty and the country.’
Nadler argued this was why lawmakers needed to obtain the underlying documents and evidence Mueller used to come to his conclusion and did not rule out using his subpoena power to get them.
‘We’ll use subpoenas if and when we think we have to,’ he said.
Republicans were quick to hit back, charging Democrats with a fishing expedition because of fears Mueller’s report would exonerate the president.
‘The Democrats … it seems like they now think that this is not going to be the bombshell they thought it was going to be. So they’re launching all kinds of new fishing expeditions,’ Rep. Jim Jordan said on ‘Face the Nation.’
Nadler made the rounds of the Sunday morning shows as Capitol Hill waited for the Justice Department to submit Mueller’s findings to Congress.
He argued Congress has to look at the bigger picture than Mueller did under his charge as special prosecutor.
‘The special prosecutor is limited in scope, his job was limited in scope and limited to crimes. What Congress has to do is look at a broader picture. We have the responsibility of protecting the rule of law,’ Nadler said on CNN’s ‘State of the Union.’
He also said Democrats were ‘absolutely’ willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court to obtain the full Mueller report.
Barr said in letter to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Friday that he would send them findings from Mueller, perhaps as early as this weekend. But that does not mean the full report will be made public.
Asked how long they’d be willing to wait for the full findings, he replied: ‘It won’t be months.’
He wouldn’t say if congressional investigators had enough information to charge Trump and said they needed to see Mueller’s findings first.
‘I think we have to see all the evidence. And there may be evidence that goes the other way. There might be evidence that tends to be exonerating. We need to see all the evidence. And we shouldn’t have to waste our time and the public’s time and money recreating the same information by interviewing all the same witnesses. There’s no need for that duplication at all,’ he said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’
‘We know there was collusion,’ Rep. Jerry Nadler said on ‘Fox News Sunday’
Nadler said Democrats would go all the way to the Supreme Court to see Robert Mueller’s full report on President Donald Trump (above) and Russia
Nadler also counted the Republican argument that since Mueller was not issuing any additional indictments, it meant exoneration for President Trump and his family.
The Judiciary Committee chairman pointed to the other investigations surrounding the president.
‘We know there are lots of investigations going on by other agencies. The Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, et cetera. And there may be indictments from them. So the story is not over. We don’t know. And beyond that, we don’t know the reasons. Again, that’s one of the reasons we need and the public needs to see the report,’ he said.
Nadler also he would ‘have a problem’ if the White House gets a sneak peek at Mueller’s findings as he offered no time frame on when the special counsel’s report may appear on Capitol Hill.
‘I certainly hope that does not happen and I certainly do have a problem with that. This is an investigation of the White House, of the president, of the people around him for alleged misconduct in various different ways and for subverting the Constitution in various different ways,’ Nadler said on ‘Fox News Sunday.’
‘The report should go public in its entirety and see what the chips fall,’ he added.
Nadler also said he has not heard from the Justice Department how detailed or when he will receive a summary of Mueller’s findings.
He will be one of the first lawmakers to receive it in his role as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
He referred to the letter Attorney General William Barr sent on Friday as the only indication he has of when he might hear.
‘As to how detailed no. As to when in the letter that he wrote to us on Friday, he said maybe as early as the weekend,’ Nadler said.
The White House on Sunday said it still has not seen or been briefed on what Mueller found in his investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
But for all his tough talk on continuing investigations of the president, Nadler said it’s way to early to talk impeachment.
‘It way too early to talk about impeachment or not. We have to look at – as I said, our mandate is not to impeach the president or anything like that. Our mandate is to defend the rule of law and to mitigate our constitutional liberties and to buck up the institutions that have been weakened by the attacks of this administration,’ he noted.
He said he did not think Trump would be successful if he tried to exert executive privilege to try and hold back parts of Mueller’s findings.
‘The president must personally assert executive privilege. And I do not believe it exists here at all because, as we learned from the Nixon tapes case, executive privilege cannot be used to hide wrongdoing. And in that case, the Supreme Court nine to nothing ordered that all the claims of executive privilege be overridden and the tapes be public. So I don’t think that executive – I mean, the president may try to assert it, may try to hide things behind it. But I don’t think that’s right or be successful,’ he said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’