The House Intelligence Committee will not enforce a subpoena against Attorney General William P. Barr as planned Wednesday, after the Justice Department agreed at the 11th hour to produce the redacted material and underlying information from the special counsel’s report that the panel sought, albeit more slowly than it wanted.
Schiff added that he expects the “initial production” of providing the committee with 12 categories of counterintelligence and foreign intelligence material from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of election interference by Russia would “be completed by the end of next week.”
The deal is a rare instance of detente between House Democrats and Justice Department leaders, who remain bitterly at odds over the administration’s resistance to congressional requests for documents and witnesses. But just hours the agreement was announced, President Trump declared that he would not work with congressional Democrats on any legislative ventures so long as investigations of his campaign, finances and foreign ties continue.
Trump made the announcement during a news conference at the White House in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) accusation Wednesday morning that Trump was “engaged in a coverup” — something Trump vehemently denied.
It is not clear if the president’s declaration jeopardizes the deal the House Intelligence Committee struck with the Justice Department; a spokesman for Schiff did not immediately return a request for comment on that matter.
In a letter Tuesday to Schiff, Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote that “the Department is willing to move forward with efforts to accommodate the Committee’s legitimate interests” to view the items it requested.,But he argued that the Justice Department would need more time to produce them. Boyd made the counteroffer contingent on the committee’s promise “that it will not pursue any vote on an ‘enforcement action,’ either on May 22, or while such good-faith accommodation measures continue.”
“To be clear should the Committee take the precipitous and unnecessary action of recommending a contempt finding or other enforcement action against the attorney general, then the Department will not likely be able to continue to work with the Committee to accommodate its interest in these materials,” Boyd wrote.
Holding off on the subpoena puts Schiff’s committee somewhat at odds with the rest of the House Democratic conference, where members have been agitating for impeachment proceedings against the president as other panels’ efforts to secure materials and witnesses are met with recalcitrance from the administration.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has resisted such calls for impeachment, even as pressure builds to take some action. Schiff’s decision to accept the Justice Department’s efforts to accommodate his requests provides her with a potential off-ramp to avoid calls for impeachment, at least in the near future, as the Intelligence Committee determines whether the Justice Department is satisfying its demands.
Both the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees have been making the case to Barr that they should be able to view the full contents of Mueller’s report, plus certain underlying materials. Barr has argued that it would be illegal for him to deliver the full redacted materials to the Judiciary Committee as requested, because it would require releasing grand jury information that cannot be disclosed without a court order. He has rejected House Democrats’ entreaties to join them in making an appeal to a judge to release those materials.
But Schiff made his case for seeing the same materials on the grounds that the Mueller report deals with counterintelligence matters — and the Intelligence Committee has a legal right to view materials pertaining to counterintelligence, whether they originated with a grand jury or not. Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the committee’s top Republican, had joined Schiff in letters to Barr making the case for such access, although he did not sign on to the eventual subpoena that Schiff issued earlier this month.
“The Department has repeatedly acknowledged the Committee’s legitimate oversight interest in these materials,” Schiff said in a statement Wednesday. “I look forward to, and expect, continued compliance by the Department so we can do our vital oversight work.”
