The House Judiciary Committee voted Wednesday to recommend holding Attorney General Bill Barr in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s unredacted Russia report and underlying documents, after President Trump asserted executive privilege in a bid to protect those files from release.
Both developments represented a major escalation in the already-tense fight between the two branches of government over access to information the Justice Department says cannot be legally released.
The committee’s 24-16 vote on contempt for Barr was along party lines and came after hours of debate. House leaders will now decide whether to take up the contempt citation on the House floor for a final vote. If approved, the measure would be referred to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — who could choose not to act. House Democrats could also pursue a lawsuit.
“We were forced to take a day to move a contempt citation against the attorney general of the United States,” Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said after the vote. “We did not relish doing this, but we have no choice.”
He added, “We’ve talked for a long time about approaching a constitutional crisis. We are now in it.”
Earlier, after being notified of the president’s move to invoke executive privilege, Nadler said it shows the administration does not respect congressional oversight.
“By invoking executive privilege on all of our materials that are subject to subpoena, the process has come to a screeching halt,” Nadler said. “The administration has announced loud and clear that it does not recognize Congress as a co-equal branch of government with independent constitutional oversight authority and it will continue to wage its campaign of obstruction.”
Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the committee, fired back at committee Democrats and called Wednesday’s vote a “cynical, mean-spirited, counterproductive and irresponsible step.”
“Democrats are angry the special counsel’s report did not produce the material or conclusions they expected to pave their path to impeaching the president. I feel compelled to remind everyone the report found that, despite offers to do so, no one from the Trump campaign knowingly conspired with the Russian government,” Collins said. “… They are angry our nation’s chief law enforcement officer and his deputy had the audacity to decide the evidence didn’t support charges for obstructing an investigation into something the president didn’t do.”