Nobody puts evil Fred Flintstone-face in the corner. Nobody.
The House Judiciary Committee thought they were just going to subpoena Attorney General William Barr to release Robert Mueller’s full, unredacted master’s dissertation on the investigation into Russian hijinks in the 2016 presidential election.
Well, the House Judiciary Committee forgot a few things:
1. Barr is a white man and as such, he does what he wants because that’s the way that America is set up.
2. Barr is a white man emboldened by the leader of white nationalism and the coldest White Walker to ever do it, the Night King himself, President Trump.
3. Barr is president Trump’s top cop, not America’s, as the job qualification demands, so he’s serving an audience of one and he’s not going to release the butt-naked version of “his baby.” This isn’t me being flippant; he literally called the Mueller report his baby.
“The attorney general’s failure to comply with our subpoena, after extensive accommodation efforts, leaves us no choice but to initiate contempt proceedings in order to enforce the subpoena and access the full, unredacted report,” Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, Politico reports.
Democrats have argued since the Mueller report was complete that they need to see the non-Barr remixed version to determine what Trump’s got going on, specifically the efforts Trump took to stop the investigation. Instead, Barr submitted a redacted version to Congress and released the same version to the public, a literal slap in the face to Congress.
From Politico:
The committee launched its own obstruction of justice investigation against the president earlier this year. The contempt citation explicitly mentions that probe, which is also centered on allegations of “public corruption and other abuses of power” by the president. Nadler said he would put the contempt proceedings on hold if the Justice Department engages in a “good-faith” effort to give Democrats access to the requested information.
“Attorney General Barr failed to comply with the committee’s request for these documents and thereby has hindered the committee’s constitutional, oversight, and legislative functions,” the citation states.
The contempt citation also references the Justice Department’s long-standing policy against indicting a sitting president, noting that Mueller accepted those guidelines in declining to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.
“Congress is therefore the only body able to hold the president to account for improper conduct in our tripartite system, and urgently requires the subpoenaed material to determine whether and how to proceed with its constitutional duty to provide checks and balances on the president and executive branch,” the citation states. “Otherwise, the president remains insulated from legal consequences and sits above the law.”
The Justice Department determined that they wouldn’t be releasing the full Mueller report to Congress, citing congressional overreach, which is another way of saying that the president believes they’re coming for him and it’s Barr’s job to protect him from Congress.
Mueller submitted the full report to evil John Goodman-face, who not only held it for a month but redacted several portions he claimed were sensitive information. The report that was finally released wasn’t heavily redacted but didn’t include Mueller’s underlying material, which Democrats claim is needed to determine whether Trump committed impeachable offenses.
This isn’t the first time that Rosanne Barr’s sitcom husband-face has told Democrats to fuck off; he ghosted “a hearing House Democrats had called last Thursday after his aides objected to Democrats’ request to allow committee lawyers from both parties to question Barr for 30 minutes each,” Politico reports.
In the end, a contempt citation is about as effective as a non-alcoholic beer; it looks like you’re drinking, but you won’t ever get drunk. This is symbolic posturing by a Congress that’s realizing that they’ve run up against a presidency that believes itself to be a dictatorship and Trump Jong Un doesn’t have to make his cronies do anything they don’t want to or, more importantly, anything he doesn’t want them to.