Bill Barr, Don McGahn
House Democrats officially introduced a resolution to hold Attorney General Bill Barr and former White House counsel Don McGahn in contempt for defying congressional subpoenas.
The contempt resolution will give House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) the opportunity to go to court to seek civil enforcement of the subpoena to force Barr to turn over Mueller’s unredacted report and the underlying intelligence, as well as for Don McGahn to turn over documents and publicly testify.
The House is expected to vote on the resolution on Monday.
The Hill reported:
The resolution also gives any committee chair the rare power to go to federal court to seek civil enforcement of subpoenas, both current and future orders, so long as they are granted approval by the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group.
The House Rules Committee is expected to mark up the resolution to hold Barr and McGahn in contempt on Monday, according to a Democratic congressional aide, and the full House is slated to vote on the resolution Tuesday.
Recall, Nadler subpoenaed Bill Barr for the full, unredacted Mueller report, the underlying evidence and secret grand jury material in April.
Bill Barr followed the law and released a redacted version of Mueller’s report — Barr cannot release grand jury material because it is prohibited by law to disclose people’s names who have not been indicted.
A less redacted version of Mueller’s report is available to select law makers, including Nadler, to be viewed in a SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] however the Democrats are rejecting this arrangement because they won’t be able to leak information to their stenographers in the media.
The House committee has also subpoenaed former White House counsel Don McGahn, however he refused to testify, citing a legal opinion released by the DOJ arguing he was immune from testifying because he was one of President Trump’s advisors.
At this time, Democrats are only perusing civil contempt, however they will pursue additional criminal contempt if they find behavior that “egregious enough” according to a Dem aide, The Hill reported.
