CNN reports:
Congressional Democrats’ years-long attempt to nail down whether then-President Donald Trump lied to special counsel Robert Mueller effectively ended on Friday, with the US Supreme Court wiping away court decisions where the House Judiciary Committee was told it could access secret grand jury records from key witnesses in the Mueller investigation.The House now won’t get those grand jury records — bringing to a close Democrats’ pursuit of what witnesses in the Mueller investigation said confidentially under oath about their interactions with Trump and others during the 2016 campaign.
Since 2019, the Judiciary Committee had sought access to records from the Mueller investigation’s grand jury proceedings, which were cited in Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The House had repeatedly said it wanted the records so it could consider whether to impeach Trump for attempting to obstruct the Russia investigation, which Mueller also documented.
But over the past two years, the fight plodded through the court system, with the Justice Department under Trump unsuccessfully arguing to block the release of the grand jury documents. The Supreme Court initially had agreed to hear the case, but then delayed it following Trump’s loss of the presidency in November.
On Friday, the high court vacated earlier rulings. The Justice Department under President Joe Biden wanted this result, saying the case had become moot. The House didn’t oppose the department’s move.But a top lawyer for the House in June noted the case was ending because Trump was no longer President.Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters”
“The Trump Administration succeeded in running out the clock and thereby undermined the ability of the House of Representatives to have access to all of the relevant facts as it considered impeachment,” House General Counsel Douglas Letter wrote in a filing to the Supreme Court. In the future, “the Committee fully trusts that the Justice Department will return to its prior longstanding position and support disclosure at the appropriate time. Any failure to do so would gravely unsettle the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution and undermine the public’s trust in our system of government.”
About as neat an illustration as we have of the structural failure of the Special Counsel process to produce any possibility of accountability.
The Special Counsel considered himself forbidden from holding the President he was appointed to investigate responsible for anything, even by a mere accusation, and the AG and judiciary (departing from Judge Sirica’s precedent) blocked the info he uncovered from reaching Congress and now the judiciary and the administration that was next elected have ensured the public won’t learn what the full scope of Mueller found out about Trump either. What good is a process that collects a bunch of secrets that can’t be used in any way in an impenetrable vault?
Originally tweeted by southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) on July 6, 2021.