President Donald Trump claimed he is once again the victim of so-called "presidential harassment" in a tweet slamming Democrats, whom he characterized as insatiable.
"There is nothing we can ever give to the Democrats that will make them happy," he wrote.
But there is something the president––and his administration––can do. It's called releasing the Mueller report, which is the culmination of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russian operatives to subvert the 2016 presidential election.
Everyone was making the same joke.
The report, according to a letter penned by Attorney General William Barr on March 24, found insufficient evidence that President Trump or members of his campaign “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” an announcement that has prompted the president to proclaim victory over his opponents although the full report and its contents have still not been released to the public.
The House Judiciary Committee yesterday approved a subpoena for the Mueller report, one day after the April 2 deadline Democrats set for Barr to provide the full report and its underlying evidence to Congress.
“We have an obligation to read the full report, and the Department of Justice has an obligation to provide it, in its entirety, without delay. If the department is unwilling to produce the full report voluntarily, then we will do everything in our power to secure it for ourselves,” House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Monday.
A New York Times report yesterday revealed that some of the special counsel's investigators have told associates that "Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated."
The report continues:
At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.
Mr. Barr has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter.
A person familiar with the investigations told reporters "the special counsel’s office never asked Mr. Barr to release the summaries soon after he received the report."
Instead of advocating for the report's release, the president has lashed out at the New York Times, accusing the publication of having "no legitimate sources, which would be totally illegal, concerning the Mueller Report. In fact, they probably had no sources at all!"
Earlier this morning, the president insisted that polling indicates that "few people seem to care about the Russian Collusion Hoax, but some Democrats are fighting hard to keep the Witch Hunt alive."
In fact, the latest poll from the PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist shows that 75 percent of Americans believe that the report should be made public.
Support for the Mueller report's release transcends party lines, "with 54 percent of Republicans wanting to see the report, along with 90 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of people who identify as politically independent."
@jaketapoer/Bluesky
