Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BOREALIS]

Mueller has powerful new House allies as he bears down on Trump

Democrats are primed to help the special counsel shed light on any illicit behavior by the president and his allies.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN

11/07/2018 09:15 AM EST

Special counsel Robert Mueller is set to emerge from his midterm campaign hibernation period with a powerful new ally as House Democrats surged back to the majority in Tuesday’s elections.

The lead Russia investigator, who in the days and weeks ahead has a series of important court hearings and key sentencing deadlines for cooperating witnesses, will soon have a friendly audience of Democratic chairmen on one end of Capitol Hill who are primed with subpoena power to fight the White House if it tries to block the public release of his final report examining any potential connections between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and Kremlin-sponsored hackers.

House Democrats say they’re also ready to act as a backstop if Trump follows through on more than 18 months of pent-up angst and fires Mueller or tries to meddle with the special counsel’s work through a major shakeup at the Justice Department.

Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has already pledged to make sure Mueller’s “documentation is preserved” and the likely next House speaker also holds in her back pocket the threat of launching impeachment hearings against Trump if the president tries to oust Mueller or if the special counsel’s investigators ultimately uncover a smoking gun involving criminal behavior.

Democrats are even prepping a break-glass scenario in case there’s a Nixon-era Saturday Night Massacre during which Trump fires his current DOJ leadership and tries to shutter the Mueller probe in the process. If that happens, senior Democratic officials say Mueller would likely get an immediate summons to Capitol Hill for nationally televised testimony about his findings.
The most reliable politics newsletter.

“I think you could expect Democrats to take pieces of what they shut down and expose it publicly,” said a high-ranking Democratic policy adviser familiar with Pelosi’s planning. “This is a report paid for with taxpayer dollars. So taxpayers would have a right to know what Mr. Mueller found.”

The Democrats’ midterm victory also gives Mueller company in his search for answers about what happened more than two years ago between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian hackers accused of stealing Democratic emails and releasing them in a bid to help a rookie Republican politician win the White House.

Republicans had embarked on sporadic efforts to interview key witnesses tied to the 2016 election but Democrats had long complained that the hearings were window dressing for a broader effort to discredit Mueller and his probe.

Now, Democrats have the power to act on dozens of their own long-bridled demands for information and witness interviews — and can share their findings freely with Mueller.

They plan to ship dozens of transcripts — collected during interviews with the likes of longtime Trump associate Roger Stone and Donald Trump Jr. — to Mueller for possible prosecution on perjury charges. They want Justice Department briefings on allegations Trump directed his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen to break campaign finance laws during the 2016 White House race in order to silence an adult film actress who claimed to have had an affair with Trump.

They’re also in position to examine Trump’s pardon powers, which they’ve warned the president might try to use to insulate himself from legal exposure in the wake of guilty pleas from Cohen and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has said he’s planning to re-open his panel’s shuttered Russia investigation using as a road map a list of about 70 people, organizations and companies Democrats say the GOP failed to adequately examine.

Early Wednesday morning, Schiff also said Democrats have an opportunity to finally do what their Republican colleagues refused to — protect Mueller.

“I think that the chances that Bob Mueller will be able to finish his work improved for the reason that our committee and others like the Government Reform Committee and the Judiciary Committee, which under Republican leadership served as basically surrogates for the president in their efforts to batter down the Justice Department, to give the president a pretext … to fire people in the Justice Department, all of that tearing down of the independence of these institutions is going to end,” Schiff said on MSNBC. “Now that doesn’t mean the president can’t still act in ways that are antithetical to the rule of law and the interest of justice, but it does mean that we’re better able to protect our institutions and see this investigation, I hope, complete.”

[...]

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/07/mueller-house-democratic-majority-970325