BREAKING NEWS: Judge rules House Democrats can have Mueller grand jury materials including evidence cited in final report – and says they’re engaged in ‘an official impeachment inquiry’
- Judge agrees with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Democrat-led committees are running ‘an official impeachment inquiry’
- He says the Justice Department must hand the Judiciary Committee, helmed by Trump arch-rival Jerry Nadler, additional materials from the Mueller report
- The version of the report Congress got was more complete than the public copy but still had many ‘redactions’ – blacked-out portions
- The DOJ refused to let congressional Democrats see materials related to secret grand jury hearings
- Now the judge says that’s not permitted, and Democrats can also see evidence linked to the redacted materials Mueller included in his report
A federal judge ruled on Friday that House Democrats on an impeachment crusade must have access to the parts of Robert Mueller’s Russia report that were kept from them because of grand jury secrecy rules.
And Judge Beryl Howell, the chief jurist in Washington, D.C.’s federal courts, handed President Donald Trump a broader defeat by ruling that Democrats are engaged in ‘an official impeachment inquiry.’
That could be a game-changer. The White House has refused to obey subpoenas and document requests from House committees engaged in impeachment inquiries, insisting Speaker Nancy Pelosi must first hold a politically fraught floor vote to formally authorize it.
President Donald Trump’s efforts to stop a House impeachment got a kick in the gut on Friday with a federal court ruling
A judge in Washington ruled that House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (pictured) can have everything in the Robert Mueller report that was withheld from Congress because of grand jury secrecy rules
When Mueller’s report cited grand-jury materials, it was blacked out – along with footnotes pointing to evidence; Judge Beryl Howell is awarding the evidence to the Democras in Congress too
But Howell declared Friday that ‘[e]ven in cases of presidential impeachment, a House resolution has never, in fact, been required to begin an impeachment inquiry.’
‘The Speaker of the House of Representatives has announced an official impeachment inquiry, and the House Judiciary Committee, in exercising Congress’s “sole Power of Impeachment” … is reviewing the evidence set out in the Mueller Report,’ Howell wrote.
He set an October 30 deadline for Trump’s Justice Department to hand over ‘[a]ll portions of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election that were redacted pursuant to’ restrictions typically placed on grand jury materials.
Democrats will also get ‘any underlying transcripts or exhibits referenced in the portions of the Mueller Report that were redacted’ for grand jury secrecy reasons.
Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the Justice Department can’t keep secret grand-jury-related materials away from congressional committees that are engaged in an impeachment inquiry
Page after page of the Mueller report was redacted, much of it to hide federal grand jury information from prying eyes
The Mueller report, the result of 22 months of secretive interviews and testimony, exists in three versions. The complete report is available only to senior federal law enforcement officials like the FBI director and the attorney general.
The publicly released version includes more than 2,000 lines blacked-out – called ‘redactions’ – amounting to about 12 per cent of the report.
Congress got a near-complete version, with only grand jury materials redacted. Howell’s ruling is appealable, but if it stands those final redactions will drop away on Capitol Hill.