President Trump and the White House waited with the rest of the world on Sunday for the final report by special counsel Robert Mueller about his investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley told reporters who traveled to Florida with Trump that neither he nor anyone else on staff had received the report or been briefed on it.
Trump is in Florida; White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and another top attorney, Emmet Flood, traveled with him, among other staffers.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein have been reviewing Mueller’s report over the weekend at the Justice Department.
They were expected to transmit some of its high level conclusions to Congress — and the wider public — as soon as Sunday, likely in a letter summarizing the source document.
Calls have been nearly universal and bipartisan, however, for Mueller’s original report to be released, and for the public or Congress to access its findings and its underlying source material.
Many Republicans and Democrats agree they will not be content only with a Barr-drafted synopsis of the report.
“It needs to be released to the Congress and it needs to be released to the American people,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told CNN on Sunday morning. “This has consumed two years of the American people’s time and we need full transparency.”
Congressional Democrats meanwhile, appeared nearly unanimous about the need for wide release and individual Democrats also tried to preempt what they feared might be attempts by the White House to conceal Mueller’s findings.
Executive privilege
Specifically, one longstanding question has been whether Trump might seek to invoke executive privilege, the doctrine that allows an administration to keep secret some of its internal workings.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., told NBC on Sunday morning that he thinks the president shouldn’t attempt it.
“I do not believe it exists here at all because, as we learned from the [Richard] Nixon tapes case, executive privilege cannot be used to hide wrongdoing,” Nadler said.
Continued Nadler: “In that case, the Supreme Court, nine to nothing, ordered that all the claims of executive privilege be overridden and the tapes be public ... The president may try to assert it, may try to hide things behind it. But I don’t think that’s right or be successful.”
Trump hasn’t opposed publication
Trump, for his part, has said in the past both that he doesn’t mind if Mueller’s report becomes public — because he says he has done nothing wrong — but also that there shouldn’t have been a Mueller report in the first place.
Trump has gone back and forth about what he accepts about the Russian interference in 2016 but he has been consistent that neither he nor anyone in his campaign had any connection to it.
That idea is a “hoax” perpetuated by conspirators and Democrats sore that Hillary Clinton lost to him, Trump says, who have been consequently running a “witch hunt” against him.
If a near-consensus had formed on Sunday about the need to release Mueller’s findings and his evidence — at least to Congress — what remained unclear was precisely what would happen next with Barr and the Justice Department.
Officials gave only a general indication that something might happen in the afternoon but did not commit to any particular time or describe in more detail what Barr would give to the Congress.
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