In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) argued that the president cannot use executive privilege to withhold the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited Trump-Russia report.
“As we learned from the Nixon tapes case, executive privilege cannot be used to hide wrongdoing,” Nadler said.
The report needs to be made public, he argued. “It’s critical that everything in that report and the underlying evidence be public, be open to the American people. That transparency is key. America needs answers as to what’s been going on.” Nadler also promised to subpoena the Justice Department for the Mueller report, if necessary.
Mueller has concluded his investigation and submitted his report to Attorney General William Barr on Friday. Barr is expected to brief Congress on the findings “as soon as this weekend,” according to a letter he submitted to lawmakers on Friday.
The White House has so far been especially quiet about the Mueller report. Last week, President Donald Trump tweeted that “there should be no Mueller Report,” but on Wednesday changed his tune: “Let it come out, let people see it,” he told reporters.
Although Mueller’s report recommends no further indictments, Nadler also appeared on Fox News Sunday, saying indictments may come out of investigations into Trump in the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia.
And, regardless of what the Mueller report finds, Nadler pointed out collusion is “in plain sight.”
“We know for example that the president’s son and his campaign manager were present at a meeting with the Russians to receive information which they were told in the invitation was part of the Russian government’s attempt to help them in the election,” he told Fox News anchor Chris Wallace on Sunday.
“We know that the campaign manager gave targeting data, political targeting data, to an agent over the Russian government. Maybe it’s not indictable but we know there was collusion. The question is to what degree and for what purpose.”
