Barr standoff

House Democrats set the stage for a Barr standoff

The White House says Democrats are being 'childish' with their demands.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN and ANDREW DESIDERIO

A key House committee with the power to impeach President Donald Trump is moving ahead with a Thursday hearing to question Attorney General William Barr about the Mueller report, even if the attorney general doesn’t show.

The standoff took its latest turn Monday when the Judiciary Committee formally announced plans to hold a Wednesday morning vote that would authorize the panel’s Democratic and GOP counsels to split an hour of additional questioning about the special counsel’s findings on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible obstruction of justice by Trump.

DOJ officials have objected to committee staff questioning Barr in public about the Mueller report, setting the stage for an explosive hearing Thursday. Democrats have threatened to issue a subpoena if Barr refuses to show up on Thursday.

By sticking with their proposed format for the hearing, Democrats are essentially daring the Justice Department to cave or fight back.

“Administration witnesses — or any witnesses — have to come in and be examined as the committee sees fit, not as they see fit,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

“He is supposed to show up on Thursday. And we will take whatever action to take if he doesn’t,” Nadler added.

DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said Barr was the one who volunteered to testify before Congress about the Mueller report. “Therefore, members of Congress should be the ones doing the questioning,” she said. “He remains happy to engage with members on their questions regarding the Mueller report.”

But Democrats view the Justice Department’s latest posturing as simply a continuation of the Trump administration’s attempts to stonewall their myriad investigations targeting the president and his White House. Lawmakers said allowing staff lawyers to question Barr would serve as a complement to their own grilling on Thursday morning.

“The attorney general seems to want to dictate the internal decision-making of the House Judiciary Committee. That’s plainly unacceptable to us,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of that panel, said in an interview. “We obviously can’t and don’t tell him how to run his meetings. And he can’t tell us how to run our meetings.”

“The attorney general of the United States should not be afraid of questioning by a lawyer,” Raskin added.

At the White House, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters “we’re looking at all this.” She insisted that the administration wants “to be as cooperative as possible.”

“But at the same time,” Sanders added, “you have to look at the outrageous behavior particularly of the House Democrats who ... are asking for things they know they can’t have, that they know they have no legal authority to have and frankly, they're just acting really childish.”

Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are taking Barr’s side, arguing there’s no precedent for committee staffers to question an attorney general.

A GOP aide said it would be “disrespectful to the office” of the attorney general to have staffers question Barr.

But Democrats have pointed to past instances in which a Cabinet official has taken questions from aides during a hearing, most notably when then-Attorney General Edwin Meese was questioned on Capitol Hill about the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987.

Democrats said committee staffers have questioned witnesses during the Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton impeachment hearings, too; and last year, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee used an outside counsel to question Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who came forward during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation process to accuse the then-judge of sexual misconduct.

Staffers also participated in interviews of former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch when Republicans controlled the House for the first two years of the Trump presidency.

As of Monday evening, lawmakers were not certain whether Barr would commit to attending Thursday’s hearing.

The House hearing is one of two scheduled appearances for Barr this week on Capitol Hill.

The GOP-led Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning gets the first opportunity to question the attorney general, a session that will include its own share of theatrics with three Democrats running for the White House — Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris — serving on the panel.

The 2020 hopefuls will share the stage with Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), an outspoken Trump ally who drew criticism on Sunday when he said he doesn’t care if the president told then-White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller during the early stages of the Russia probe — one of a dozen instances of potential obstruction of justice involving the president that the special counsel examined.

Sanders praised the Senate hearing as “the way the process should work” — an open hearing featuring questions from lawmakers.

Mueller’s redacted findings released earlier this month included reams of evidence about the president’s efforts to thwart or end the Mueller investigation, even as the special counsel also concluded there was no criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

So far, Democratic leaders have pumped the brakes on using the Mueller report as grounds to formally launch impeachment proceedings, though they continue to press for more evidence and information from the special counsel’s investigators.

A Judiciary Committee subpoena already issued to DOJ demands access by Wednesday to the unredacted Mueller report, as well as its underlying grand jury evidence and testimony.

“We expect the department to adhere to the subpoena,” Nadler said Monday. “As with any subpoena, we are open to negotiating certain things to make an accommodation with the executive branch.”

Nadler said the Justice Department’s current offer — to permit only select lawmakers and staffers to view a less-redacted version of the report in a closed setting — remains inadequate.

“It’s totally unacceptable,” Nadler said. “It’s useless.”

Trump on Monday also added to the partisan tension by praising Barr for his handling of the Mueller probe.

“Bob Mueller was a great HERO to the Radical Left Democrats,” the president posted on Twitter. “Now that the Mueller Report is finished, with a finding of NO COLLUSION & NO OBSTRUCTION (based on a review of Report by our highly respected A.G.), the Dems are going around saying, ‘Bob who, sorry, don’t know the man.”