BY BRIAN BEUTLER, PRIYANKA ARIBINDI

& CROOKED MEDIA

Thursday, March 28, 2019

—Donald Trump, whose administration has proposed defunding the special olympics for years

RAISE HELL 

The deadline six House committee chairs set for Attorney General William Barr to turn over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full report is April 2, but Barr has already informed House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler that he’ll miss the deadline. Barr also will not commit to providing Congress the full report, and only provided Nadler the report’s official page count on the condition that he not share the number publicly.

Nearly a week after Mueller submitted his report, all we know about it, beyond what’s in Barr’s highly political three-and-a-half page summary, is that it is somewhere between 300 and 1000 pages long.

This is an unacceptable state of affairs, and it’s past time for House Democrats to use their official powers to either obtain the report itself, make its details public, or get some answers from the Justice Department.

Here’s what Democrats can do.

• Subpoena the report. This is the most obvious step they can and presumably will take, but it would likely tee up lengthy legal battles over what the administration has a right to withhold. On the other hand, the threat of a subpoena might allow Democrats to secure a public and airtight commitment from Barr to share the entire report minus the narrowest omissions (say, to protect ongoing investigations) by a specific date.

• Subpoena Mueller. There has been a lot of chatter about Barr’s forthcoming testimony to Congress, but he has already revealed himself to be an unreliable narrator. Mueller remains widely trusted, but he can’t speak out of turn. Subpoenaing him would unshackle him, personally, and leave it to the administration to decide whether to silence him—but by silencing him, they’d give up the game.

• Begin impeachment proceedings. House leadership has made clear that Democrats are terrified of impeachment, but that may be the only way they can successfully secure Mueller’s grand jury materials, which are otherwise bound by strict secrecy requirements. That’s what happened during Watergate, and it should be on the table today.

• Lose their shit. It sounds silly, but a sustained Democratic message that the administration is hiding something, and that they must release the full report might just work better than anything else. Last year, Republicans generated days of anticipation by making the Twitter hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo go viral. This was about an absurd, conspiracy theory-ridden document that their own party wrote, but they were able to create a widespread sense that the government was hiding something explosive from the public. That’s what’s actually happening now, and Dems shouldn’t shy away from building public pressure.

The Democratic toolbox also includes holding Barr and other officials in contempt of Congress and threatening to withhold funds from certain Justice Department components or programs. But the key is to demonstrate that concealing Mueller’s findings is unacceptable, and they won’t get away with quietly burying it. Asking nicely, which has been the Democrats’ disappointing approach to oversight thus far, will not suffice here.

Republicans on the House intelligence committee publicly called upon the committee’s chairman, Adam Schiff, to step down at a hearing that was supposed to be about whether President Trump’s business negotiations with Moscow—which he lied about throughout the campaign and well into his presidency—left him compromised.

Schiff’s response was to deliver Republicans the shaming they deserve. Watch →

Hopefully this is a lesson Democrats will heed about who they’re dealing with. When they returned to power, Democrats set about trying to restore comity on their committees, after enduring years of Republican abuse. They were not rewarded for their kindness because Republicans understand that they’re not there to make friends.

Parliament held eight non-binding votes on possible Brexit outcomes on Wednesday—none of which passed—after taking control of the Brexit process from British Prime Minister Theresa May. Experts believe this increases the odds that Parliament will schedule a second Brexit referendum, rather than leave the European Union without a plan in place to facilitate it.

President Trump inflated the height of Trump Tower, the size of his winery, and the number of home lots for sale on his golf courses, in order to secure financing from lenders. This is what most lawyers would call mortgage fraud, what Bill Barr might call failure to establish that Trump committed robbery, and what Trump would call COMPLETE AND TOTAL EXONERATION.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry secretly approved a deal to allow American companies to share nuclear information with Saudi Arabia—an arrangement of questionable legality that is almost certainly corrupt—thus bringing Perry’s surprising claim to being Trump’s least-scandalous cabinet secretary to an end.

NRA official Mark Richardson contacted a known Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist proposing a conspiracy theory that the official record of events in Parkland was untrue, in the immediate aftermath of the massacre there. These people are unspeakably disgusting.

U.S. economic growth slowed to 2.2 percent in the final quarter of last year, and is expected to have slowed even further in the first quarter of this one.

Ivanka Trump’s lawyer requested changes to Michael Cohen’s perjurious testimony to Congress (for which Cohen will serve time in prison) to downplay her involvement in the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations, which Cohen now says he briefed her about several times.

Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University has something it calls an aviation company that received $20,000 from the Trump campaign after Falwell spoke at a Trump rally in 2016, and got a $900,000 Pentagon contract in 2017. Welcome to the grift shoppe—enjoy your two-to-six year stay.

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Former Vice President and maybe presidential candidate Joe Biden told college students working to combat sexual assault that he wished he “could have done something” to prevent Republicans from smearing Anita Hill after she accused now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991. As chair, Biden did not allow other women who could corroborate Hill’s allegations, and who had experienced similar harassment, to testify against Thomas alongside Hill, and Republicans on the committee exploited the he-said/she-said nature of the hearing to call her a liar—a mistake that has come back to haunt him as he weighs a presidential candidacy in the #MeToo era.

Hill has previously taken note of Biden’s refusal to admit error. “He said, ‘I am sorry if she felt she didn’t get a fair hearing.’ That’s sort of an ‘I’m sorry if you were offended.’”

Here are some longer thoughts about how Democrats who want to be president should account for their mistakes. (Spoiler: not like this.)

The Justice Department has arrested 18 members and associates of an Alaska-based white-supremacist gang and charged them with for their “roles in a racketeering enterprise involving narcotics distribution, firearms trafficking, and acts of violence including murder, assault, and kidnapping.” The president, who tweeted something stupid and inappropriate about Jussie Smollett today, will ignore this because he says white nationalism isn’t a problem.

Same, tbh.

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