Emboldened by Team Mueller’s remarks about the Mueller report, Jerry Nadler drops the hammer on William Barr
Last night Palmer Report explained why it probably wasn’t a coincidence that, just hours after the House Judiciary Committee voted to subpoena the Mueller report, members of Mueller’s team began leaking to multiple major news outlets that the report was far worse for Trump than Attorney General William Barr has claimed. This made for perfect timing, because it handed Chairman Jerry Nadler the leverage he needed. Sure enough, he’s now pouncing.
The New York Times, Washington Post, and NBC News are now all independently reporting that Mueller’s team is privately accusing William Barr of substantially misrepresenting what’s really in the Mueller report. Sure enough, Nadler is using this leverage to take things to a whole new level. He’s no longer interested in merely subpoenaing the Mueller report; he’s demanding that all communications be turned over between Mueller and Barr.
While Nadler has addressed his letter to Barr, it’s worth pointing out that Mueller and his team surely have their own copies of these communications as well. This means that if Barr refuses to turn over these communications, or tries to drag out a subpoena battle, Nadler can quickly work around this by simply subpoenaing Mueller’s copies of the communications. Considering that members of Mueller’s team are outraged enough to leak about Barr’s duplicity, they’re surely willing to cooperate with Nadler’s quest to quickly expose the truth.
If the House Judiciary Committee can establish that William Barr is misrepresenting what’s in the Mueller report, and that Barr overrode whatever instructions or guidance Mueller may have provided regarding informing the public about the report, it’ll give the committee an ironclad case to convince a federal judge that the subpoena for the entire Mueller report must be swiftly complied with. Jerry Nadler appears to have seized on precisely this approach.
