Appearing on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday Morning, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff followed up on a letter that the collective chairpersons of six different House committees signed and sent to new Attorney General William Barr on Friday demanding that the final Mueller report be made public “without delay and to the maximum extent permitted by law.”
There’s nothing unreasonable about that, and that’s why it’s become the prevailing sentiment not just on the left but on the right as well in Washington.
But there is certainly a concern that the President will try himself or try to exert pressure on Barr at least, to heavily redact or even not publicly release the report. Congressman Schiff offered some explanation as to why Trump may be so desperate to hide what’s in that report, and at least some of it goes back to what was in the testimony of his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Democrats are ready to fight for it, however:
We will obviously subpoena the report. We will bring Bob Mueller in to testify before Congress. We will take it to court if necessary … We are going to get to the bottom of this. We are going to share this information with the public. And if the president is serious about all his claims of exoneration, then he should welcome the publication of this report.”
So why are they so intent on getting everything under the powerful disinfectant of daylight? Schiff spelled out exactly what was bothering many of them on Sunday’s show, after bringing up intelligence gleaned from Cohen’s testimony:
What we have learned to date about Moscow Trump Tower is chilling, and that is, as Donald Trump was campaigning for president, even when he became the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, and was telling the country he had no business dealings with Russia, he was privately through his Organization seeking the Kremlin’s help to make what may have been the most lucrative deal of his life, even reportedly offering an inducement to Putin to make it happen — and at the same time, talking about removing sanctions on Russia [in return].”
Watch Schiff explain here:
Rep. Adam Schiff: “What we have learned to-date about Moscow Trump Tower is chilling.”
As candidate and presumptive nominee, Trump “was privately … seeking the Kremlin’s help to make what may have been the most lucrative deal of his life,” he adds https://t.co/GlcWTIu29g pic.twitter.com/lLxSqYe7SL
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) February 24, 2019
Featured image via Department of Defense
