House Democrats are continuing their fierce confrontation of the Trump administration’s belligerence. This week at the Time 100 Summit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) upped the ante of her harsh dismissal of the Trump team’s handling of the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, demanding its full final report be released. Democrats have pushed for the release already; this time, Pelosi reached all the way back to the founders in making her case.
As she put it via a quote that went up on her Twitter account:
‘Our Founders spoke about how the times had found them. We feel the same today. We have a responsibility to fight for our Constitution and that starts with ensuring that the full Mueller Report is released. It’s time for the Trump administration to get out of the way.’
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) has actually already issued a subpoena for the full Mueller report, but it’s certainly not a given that the administration will take any steps whatsoever to comply outside the scope of a possible future court order in the Democrats’ favor. Nadler said at one point he was willing to take the fight for the full report all the way to the Supreme Court.
He and other House Democrats have undertaken other dramatic steps to get at the full breadth of Mueller’s findings, too, seeking testimony from individuals ranging from Attorney General William Barr to Mueller himself to former White House counsel Don McGahn, who the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed this week.
Barr’s team at the Justice Department has come under intense scrutiny for their redaction process. Considering the Trump appointee’s documented efforts to gloss over conclusions that painted the president in a negative light in his public commentary about the report, few if any among House Democrats find reason to trust him — Pelosi explicitly said she doesn’t.
As she continues her leadership of what’s for now a Democratic minority in the national government controlling “only” the House, she’s actually one of those who TIME named among the most 100 influential people of 2019. Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton wrote the magazine’s profile of her, praising her as “the driving force that brought a Democratic majority back to the House, and opened the door for a Congress that’s more diverse than any other in our nation’s history and has some of its youngest members ever” who has truly “delivered” now that she’s back on the job as House Speaker.
Check out Twitter’s response to Pelosi…
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