Congress demands full Mueller report — not the Trump team 'whitewash'

After a 22-month investigation, Congress will settle for nothing less than the full, unredacted Mueller report.

On Monday, the chairs of six House committees sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr calling his four-page summary “not sufficient” and demanding the full Mueller report and all underlying evidence be delivered to Congress no later than April 2.

As of Tuesday morning, very few people know what is in the full report submitted by special counsel Robert Mueller. The only information publicly available is a brief letter that Barr, Trump’s hand-picked attorney general, sent to Congress over the weekend. In the letter, even Barr admits that Mueller did not exonerate Trump on obstruction of justice charges.

In the demand letter to Barr, top Democrats remind him that the House voted unanimously to call for the full, public release of the Mueller report. The letter, from the chairs of the Oversight, Intelligence, Judiciary, Financial Services, Ways and Means, and Foreign Affairs Committees, notes that Congress needs to “make an independent assessment of the evidence regarding obstruction of justice.”

“We don’t want to read the CliffsNotes to Macbeth. We want to read Macbeth itself,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Shareblue Media. It is unlikely Raskin selected Macbeth — a Shakespearean tragedy describing an unstable ruler’s quest for unbridled power — by accident.

A member of both the Oversight and Judiciary committees, Raskin said the entire episode “smells of a whitewash.” He slammed Barr for engaging in an “elaborate public relations ploy” by sending a letter “purged and sanitized of any facts and details.”

In his letter to Congress, Barr declared — without providing any evidence to support his conclusion — that Trump would not face charges from the Justice Department related to obstruction of justice.

Congress needs to make its own assessment because Barr is “perhaps the single most biased person in the country” to make such a determination, according to Raskin. Before he became attorney general, Barr wrote a 20-page missive declaring his belief that no president could be brought up on charges of obstruction of justice.

And less than 48 hours after receiving the Mueller report, Barr adamantly declared that the conclusion he came to months ago is the same conclusion he has today.

“The cake was baked from the beginning,” Raskin says.

Trump has already lied about what little we know about the Mueller report. Congress has no way to know what, if anything, Barr is hiding without seeing the full report and every piece of evidence Mueller examined.

“We’ve gotta see the facts,” Raskin added.

The Department of Justice is on notice and has until April 2 to get Raskin and the rest of Congress the full report and all the facts.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.