mueller investigation

Democrats say the damage done by an earlier Republican maneuver to release classified material left the tactic unpalatable.

House Democrats say they’ll do anything it takes to force the public release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report — except for the single-most hardball tactic deployed by Republicans only one year ago.

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee last year mounted an unprecedented campaign to force the public release of classified intelligence. Democrats called the effort reckless and misleading, and the FBI said it presented “grave concerns” for national security. But Trump blessed the maneuver and ultimately declassified the material Republicans revealed in the so-called “Nunes Memo.”

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But the Democrats who now lead the House Intelligence Committee say they won’t pursue a similar strategy, even in service of making Mueller’s explosive findings public.

“That provision was so badly abused in the last Congress by the pushing out of false and misleading information that that’s not a road we want to go down,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

Democrats said the scars left by the fight over the Nunes Memo were still fresh and that the toxicity of the partisan battle had left the move — a last resort outlined in the House rules — unpalatable even as Democrats demand the public disclosure of Mueller’s findings.

Democrats’ wariness over mimicking the Republican tactic is a notable disarmament at a time when they have pledged to use their power to force the public release of Mueller’s complete findings.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said that Attorney General William Barr might try to bottle up Mueller’s most explosive findings by classifying them, and other Democrats have complained that Barr appears poised to deliver a heavily redacted report with multiple categories of information withheld from public view.

In the meantime, Democrats are pursuing more traditional methods to get access to Mueller’s report. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee plans to authorize subpoenas against Barr to demand the release of the 400-page Mueller report and underlying evidence

Top House Democrats and aides have also said they’re ready to embrace other GOP tactics they once questioned in order to access Mueller’s findings. Senior Democratic aides have spent weeks emphasizing that Republicans gained unusual levels of access to Mueller-related files by squeezing and threatening legal action against the Trump Justice Department. Ultimately, the Justice Department capitulated to GOP demands — and now Democrats say they expect the same level of access to information that Republicans got.

“The DOJ and the FBI turned over thousands of pages or made available thousands of pages related to the ongoing Russia investigation that special counsel Mueller had inherited,” a House Democratic aide said Friday. “It wasn’t only in a closed investigation. It was an open, ongoing investigation that the DOJ was conducting at the time.”

The issue underscores the party’s eagerness to try to restore some of the norms shattered by Trump and the GOP, even as many on the left say such sentiment is pointless.

But producing their own version of the Nunes Memo would be a bridge too far, House Intelligence Committee Democrats say.

“Doing what they did would violated my conscience,” said Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.). “I can’t criticize them if I go and do the same thing.”

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a new member of the Intelligence Committee, similarly said he wouldn’t favor the tactic. “I’m not a big believer in doing things the Nunes way,” he said.

Nunes’ office did not respond to a request for comment.

Schiff agreed, saying Democrats will use “whatever compulsion is necessary to make sure we get the full report and then if they’re trying to hide material by overclassification then we’ll have to discuss what remedies are available.” But he added “We don’t want to go anywhere near down the path that Republicans abused.”

Not all Intelligence Committee Democrats were quick to say Democrats should refuse to consider their own version of the Nunes Memo. One of the committee’s newest members, Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), said Democrats have to look at any and all precedents that Republicans set when deciding how to proceed.

“I think it’s just a shame that we have to look at other alternatives because the attorney general has chosen really not to cooperate,” said Demings. “What I do believe is that when precedent has been established — whether it’s previous special counsel investigations or the Nunes Memo — precedent has already been established.”

Asked if that meant she considered the Nunes Memo among the many options available to Democrats, Demings said, “Everything has to be.”

Her concerns may take on new urgency. Trump has said previously that Mueller’s full report should be released publicly, yet he signaled this week that he may be having some reservations, tweeting Tuesday a video clip of attorney Alan Dershowitz saying the attorney general isn’t legally required to release the report.

Until Nunes spearheaded the tactic, lawmakers had never used the controversial House rule, which allows the Intelligence Committee to release any information — no matter how highly classified — if the committee determines “that the public interest would be served by such disclosure.”

The Nunes Memo raised pointed questions about whether the FBI misled a secret court in order to authorize a wiretap on a former Trump campaign adviser in late 2016. It also revealed new details about the origin of the FBI’s Russia investigation, which Mueller later inherited. Democrats at the time panned the Nunes Memo as reckless and misleading and warned that its release could fray Congress’ relationship with intelligence agencies.

Under the process Republicans used to release the memo, the House Intelligence Committee “may disclose publicly any information in its possession” if a majority of members determine it is in the public interest. Any member of the committee may request such a determination and force a committee vote within five days.

If the committee supports releasing the information, it would then notify Trump, who has five days to either allow the information to become public or lodge an objection in writing.

If Trump denies the request, however, the process doesn’t end. Instead, the committee can vote to send the matter to the full House of Representatives, which would meet in a secret session to vote on the committee’s decision.

Though a secret session would be another unprecedented spectacle for Capitol Hill, a Democratic House would be almost certain to approve of such a disclosure request made by the Intelligence Committee, forcing the disclosure of Mueller’s sensitive information.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), another House Intelligence Democrat, said he doesn’t think taking such a draconian step is necessary because he’s confident the Justice Department is working in good faith to release Mueller’s report.

“I think we’re getting there but one step at a time,” he said.

Andrew Desiderio contributed reporting.

President Donald Trump appeared to backpedal on Tuesday from his initial desire for special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to be released to Congress and the public, a sharp diversion from his enthusiastic calls for the release of the highly anticipated report.

In a series of tweets, Trump disparaged congressional Democrats for their efforts to obtain the full report; noted that one of them had opposed the public release of grand jury information from independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report on Bill Clinton; and tweeted a Fox News clip of lawyer Alan Dershowitz emphasizing that the Justice Department could keep the entire Mueller report confidential.

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Multiple White House officials said Trump’s posture on releasing the report hasn’t changed, and Trump himself said Tuesday afternoon that he intends to defer entirely to his attorney general, William Barr. But Trump has unmistakably reined in his previous zeal for releasing the report publicly, which he first telegraphed last week while claiming that Mueller had “totally exonerated” him.

Though Mueller’s 400-page report is expected to conclude that no Americans criminally conspired with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, there are indications that it will include damaging information about Trump and his associates — including evidence suggesting Trump may have attempted to interfere with the investigation.

Democrats — who are gearing up to issue a subpoena for the full report on Wednesday — said Trump’s sudden hostility toward their efforts to obtain the report suggests he’s nervous about what Mueller found.

“It looks like the president … is concerned about that. He ought to live up to what he said earlier,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) “He ought to support the full release. None of that should be redacted. But clearly he’s concerned about that coming out. If he is feeling so confident about what [the report] says, then you would think he would urge its full release. But clearly he’s not. And you’d have to ask him why.”

“The president said he wanted it to be public, too,” added Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a member of the Intelligence Committee. “So it’s not us being desperate, it’s him apparently thinking about re-trading a deal. Donald Trump re-trading a deal? Shocker.”

Trump initially celebrated the report’s conclusions, as summarized by Barr last week. But as Democrats in Congress have escalated their efforts to obtain Mueller’s report and evidence, the president is now indicating he has reservations about allowing his Justice Department to fork over the full report to lawmakers.

“There is no amount of testimony or document production that can satisfy Jerry Nadler or Shifty Adam Schiff,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning, naming two top House Democrats seeking the report. “It is now time to focus exclusively on properly running our great Country!”

In a letter to lawmakers last week, Barr referred to Trump’s public statements about his desire for the report to be released, insisting that he would not share the report with the White House in advance to allow Trump to claim executive privilege.

But Trump’s posture on Tuesday made Democrats even more skeptical that the president will not invoke executive privilege to block the release of certain parts of the Mueller report that might make him look bad.

“Remember — there was no vow not to assert executive privilege. The attorney general said he had no intention of saying it because he was relying on the president’s public statements that he didn’t need it,” Himes said. “But no, I’ve always been skeptical that the White House was not going to make an effort to redact embarrassing information.”

Trump separately singled out Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, for his opposition in the late 1990s to releasing grand jury information from Starr’s report on Clinton. Nadler has urged Barr to seek a court order to release grand jury information from the Mueller report.

“In 1998, Rep. Jerry Nadler strongly opposed the release of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton,” Trump tweeted. “No information whatsoever would or could be legally released. But with the NO COLLUSION Mueller Report, which the Dems hate, he wants it all. NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM!”

Nadler declined to comment on Trump’s attacks, but Daniel Schwarz, a spokesman for the Judiciary Committee, noted that Congress had already received Starr’s underlying evidence, and that Nadler was opposed to making such evidence public.

“Our expectation is that Attorney General Barr will be as forthcoming now as Mr. Starr was in 1998,” Schwarz said. “The attorney general should provide the full Mueller report to Congress, with the underlying materials, at which point we will be in a better position to understand what Special Counsel Mueller uncovered during his investigation.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders echoed Trump and said Democrats “will never be satisfied.”

“They’re sore losers,” she said of the Democrats, five months after they won back the House of Representatives from Republicans. “They lost in 2016. They lost because they tried to convince all of America of something we all knew was untrue — that the president had colluded with Russia.”

Anita Kumar contributed to this story.

President Donald Trump’s top economic advisers are scrambling to impress upon him the potentially dire economic costs of his threat to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Both the White House’s Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow have shared economic papers and data with Trump over the last 36 hours, illustrating the way economic growth could slow down even if the president shut down the border for just one day – not to mention the effect on the flow of goods, raw materials, and the U.S. supply chain.

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Inside the White House, officials frantically spent the day searching for ways to limit the economic impact of shutting the border, according to two senior administration officials and one Republican close to the White House. One possibility involved closing the border to cars but allowing commercial trucks to continue to pass through. Officials stressed, however, that no final decisions had yet been made.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump did not seem swayed by his advisers’ economic arguments. “Sure, it will have a negative effect on the economy,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon. “But to me, trading is very important, the borders are very important, but security is what is most important. I mean, we have to have security.”

Republican Party leaders do not share Trump’s view. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that closing the border would potentially be “catastrophic” and that while he agrees there is a crisis at the border, shutting down the border is not the answer.

“Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country and I would hope we would not be doing that,” McConnell said.

Trump’s threat to close the southern border also set off a panic among influential business groups in Washington, which have scrambled to publicly underline the economic stakes of such a move in hopes of convincing the president to back down.

“You have a lot of people who are freaking out over this,” said an executive at a prominent industry group who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record, adding that shuttering the border would result in an unprecedented blow to the economy.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers and the American Automotive Policy Council, which represents Ford and General Motors, have all warned in recent days of dire consequences if Trump pulls the trigger.

NAM, which has nurtured close ties to the White House, said Tuesday that businesses stand to lose $726 million for every day the border is closed.

The U.S. auto industry is particularly concerned, facing not only the prospect of a border closure, which would limit the import of essential automobile parts, but also potential tariffs on the imports of foreign cars.

“Within a week, we’d have most of the U.S. auto industry shutdown,” said Kristin Dziczek, an expert on the economics of the auto industry at the Center for Automotive Research, a non-profit think tank based in Michigan.

“Everybody is on board that this would be very devastating. It’s not an industry that you can turn the switch on and off and no damage would be done. It’s not a light switch,” she added, warning that it could contribute to an economic downturn. “Economic recoveries don’t die of old age, they die of policy mistakes. And this is the biggest mistake I can think of.”

Senior officials at Trump-aligned outside industry groups have also privately reached out directly to the White House to stress their concerns, according to a person familiar with the matter. They’ve encouraged White House officials to make the case directly to the president that a border closure could undermine the positive economic headwinds that will be so central to Trump’s reelection message.

Administration officials insisted on Tuesday that the president remains serious about closing the border, though they said he hasn’t made a final decision.

“Our system is absolutely maxed out,” Trump said. “It’s a very unfair thing.”

The president put the onus on Congress to reach an immigration deal. “If we don’t make a deal with Congress, the border’s going to be closed, 100 percent,” he said on Tuesday afternoon.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders also expressed those concerns earlier Tuesday.

“This isn’t our first choice,” Sanders told reporters outside the White House. “Our first choice would be for Democrats to actually sit down with us and help fix a broken system to address the national security and humanitarian crisis that exists at our border.”

congress

The oversight panel also approved subpoenas for an investigation into the 2020 census.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee on Tuesday voted to authorize three subpoenas as part of Democrats’ increasingly aggressive investigations into the White House security clearance process and the Trump administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

In a party-line vote, the committee authorized Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) to issue a subpoena for former White House Personnel Security Director Carl Kline to testify before the panel about his role in approving security clearances. The panel also authorized subpoenas for documents from Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross related to the 2020 census.

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The threat of subpoenas — which Cummings can now issue at any time — come a day after the committee revealed that it interviewed White House employee Tricia Newbold, a whistleblower who said that senior officials ignored national security concerns to approve security clearances for 25 individuals whose applications were initially denied. Newbold described a “systematic” pattern of abuses on the part of Kline — who, according to Cummings, has been stonewalling the committee’s recent requests for information.

“Tricia Newbold came forward at great personal risk to warn the Congress and the nation about the grave security risks she has been witnessing first-hand over the past two years,” Cummings said, later telling reporters that it was possible he could issue the subpoenas “immediately.”

“When we are blocked from getting information, we can’t hold anybody accountable,” Cummings added.

Kline’s attorney, Robert Driscoll, sent a letter to Cummings on Tuesday saying his client would be willing to testify before the committee voluntarily, calling a subpoena “extreme and unnecessary.”

Republican members of the committee echoed that sentiment, accusing Democrats of conducting a partisan investigation. Ahead of the vote, Republicans and Democrats bickered over the scope of the committee’s probe, with GOP lawmakers asserting that the president has an absolute right to issue security clearances.

One Republican, Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, referenced the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, saying the alleged abuses of the White House security clearance process can’t be compared to “classified emails being on an unsecured server.” Democrats dismissed comparisons to the Clinton investigation, arguing that the Trump administration is risking U.S. national security by overruling career officials’ denials of security clearances.

Green also introduced a resolution to refer Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former attorney, to the Justice Department for perjury prosecution. Cummings swiftly denied a vote on the measure.

Democrats said a subpoena was necessary in order to force Kline to answer questions about Newbold’s specific allegations, including that he often overruled clearance applications that were denied due to “disqualifying issues” such as foreign influence and other misconduct. Cummings said Kline was only willing to testify about the “general policies” of the security clearance process.

Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the White House under Republican and Democratic presidents, said she kept a list of 25 people — including senior officials with daily access to Trump — whose clearances were initially denied but overruled.

“This is a systemic crisis for all Americans,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Oversight panel. “This woman is an American hero for what she’s doing.”

The committee’s investigation gained new steam earlier this year after it was reported that Trump ordered his then-chief of staff to grant a top-secret security clearance to Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, in a move that overruled intelligence officials.

Cummings has requested documents and witness interviews from the White House related specifically to Kushner’s clearance. The White House has rejected those demands.

The committee later authorized Cummings to issue subpoenas for documents from Barr and Ross related to the Commerce Department’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Those votes, too, fell along party lines.

On Monday night, the Commerce Department’s legislative affairs chief sent a letter to Cummings asking him to “abstain from considering or issuing a subpoena while our good faith dialogue continues.” In a statement after Tuesday’s vote, Ross did not acknowledge the subpoena or whether he intends to comply.

“The department remains committed to an open and responsive relationship with the committee and has been nothing but cooperative with the committee’s expansive and detailed requests for records,” Ross said. “As of today, we have turned over 11,500 pages of documents to the committee, and I voluntarily testified in front of the same committee for nearly seven hours on this issue two weeks ago.”

Lawmakers authorized the subpoenas anyway, demanding that Ross and Barr turn over specific documents including communications with the White House, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, among other entities. The committee also asked the cabinet secretaries to turn over specific memos and emails which purport to detail how officials made the decision to add a question about citizenship.

“The committee is trying to determine the real reason Secretary Ross added the citizenship question, and the documents and testimony covered by these subpoenas are critical to answering that question,” Cummings said.

The issue has already reached the Supreme Court, after a federal judge blocked the Commerce Department from adding the citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Democrats have warned that adding such a question to the census would result in an under-count of the public in certain parts of the country with high immigrant populations, resulting in less federal funding to such communities and potentially fewer congressional seats and Electoral College votes.

Barr is already in lawmakers’ crosshairs over their demands to see special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report and all of the underlying evidence contained within it.

The House Judiciary Committee is set to vote on Wednesday to authorize Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) to issue a subpoena for the special counsel’s full report on Russian intervention in the 2016 election and potential obstruction of justice committed by Trump.