On Wednesday, President Trump asserted executive privilege as it concerned the full, unredacted Mueller report from special counsel Robert Mueller, this came just as the house Democrats from the Judiciary Committee, were casting votes to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress, for his role in not turning over the unredacted report and other underlying materials in response to the subpoena issued by the committee. The committee is headed by chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in her statement, that “faced with Chairman Nadler’s blatant abuse of power, and at the Attorney General’s request, the President has no other option than to make a protective assertion of executive privilege.”
In a letter submitted, just as the meeting of the committee was getting underway, to Nadler from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, the Justice Department explained the reason for the executive privilege made by the administration.
The contempt vote and the executive privilege assertion are the first moves in a process to censure the attorney general and fight for the documents in court. The president’s privilege assertion could complicate Democrats’ efforts to secure documents, and possibly testimony, in their efforts to review Mueller’s findings.
In an interview on CNN on Wednesday, Nadler referred to the impasse as “a constitutional crisis.”
Nadler said later after the committee meeting commenced that “if allowed to go unchecked, this obstruction means the end of congressional oversight. No person—and certainly not the top law enforcement officer in the country—can be permitted to flout the will of Congress and to defy a valid subpoena.”
