President Trump said he’s fine with the Justice Department releasing special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report without the White House having a chance to examine it first, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made the revelation during an interview Tuesday evening with Fox News’ Shannon Bream, offering a potential solution to Democrats concerned the president might try to assert executive privilege on key aspects of the report before they see it.
“[Trump] decided that the White House is OK with releasing it without looking at it,” Graham, R-S.C., said.
“I talked to him just a few minutes ago, the president, and he said let it out,” he added. “There’ll be some things in there I think will be interesting in terms of conversations. But the bottom line here is that Mueller has looked at this for two and a half years. He’s concluded that no one on the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians and that the facts regarding obstruction were insufficient for him to make a decision. Therefore there is no way you could prosecute a case that the prosecutor is unsure.”
Mueller concluded his nearly two-year-long Russia investigation last week and sent his final report to the Justice Department. Attorney General William Barr shared a summary of Mueller’s report to Congress on Sunday that said Mueller’s team found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller also declined to determine whether Trump obstructed justice, and Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded there was insufficient evidence to show the president committed a crime.
During an interview Sunday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said he would “have a problem” if the White House got to see a summary of Mueller’s final report before he does.
“As we know from the Nixon tapes case, the Supreme Court decided … executive privilege cannot be used to shield wrongdoing and certainly they should not get an advance look at the report,” Nadler said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The report should go public in its entirety and see what the chips fall.”
Not satisfied with just a four-page summary, Democrats in Congress have clamored for the entire report to be released. In a letter Monday, House Democrats gave the Justice Department a one-week ultimatum to submit Mueller’s full report and the underlying documents to Congress.
Certain that the report has exonerated him, Trump said Monday it “wouldn’t bother me at all” if the full Mueller report was released for Democrats to examine.
Graham, who had dinner with the attorney general, said Barr told him he plans to release a version of the Mueller report to the public in “weeks, not months.”
“The report is being looked at for a couple of things,” Graham said. “We cannot release grand jury information because It violates the law. So he’s going to check with Mr. Mueller to make sure that everything that is grand jury related is taken out of the report because the law requires that. He’s going to go to the intelligence community to make sure that we don’t release classified information or sources and methods that may jeopardize our national security. He’s going to talk to some prosecutors who have cases associated with this to see if anything in the report would undercut them.”
Graham predicted Barr will turn the report “over to the committee and then I think he’ll come to the Senate hopefully sometime in April.”
