House Democrats Reading Entire Redacted Mueller Report Out Loud For Hours
Alicia Powe
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A group of more than 25 angry Democrats are taking turns reading the entire redacted report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller out loud on the House floor.
The group began reading the report that found no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in the Rules Committee room on Capitol Hill Thursday around noon ET and planned on finishing the 448-page report in 12- 14 hours.
The report is being live-streamed and the recording will be made into an audio-book.
The spectacle comes as Democrats demand the entire, unredacted Mueller report be disclosed and they are pursing legal action to obtain it.
Pennsylvania Democrat Mary Gay Scanlon, vice chairwoman of the House Judiciary Committee, who rallied Democrats to join her in the public reading, warns the report indicates there are instances that could qualify as obstruction of justice.
“We’ve been saying for weeks that if you think there was no obstruction and no collusion, you haven’t read the Mueller report,” Scanlon told the Washington Post. “So the ongoing quest has been, ‘How do we get that story out there while we are waiting for the witness to come in?”
Scanlon insists Democrats’ 12 hour stunt staged on the House floor has nothing to do with politics.
“It’s not a ploy to keep anything going.The Mueller report was a mandate from the Department of Justice that there be an investigation into these very troubling aspects about what was happening in our government,” she said. “So you know, it may be inconvenient, it may be time-consuming, but its what we have to do.”
Last week, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the Department of Justice for the full unredacted report. Attorney General William Barr rejected their demand and the committee voted to hold Barr in contempt. The attorney general, however, will not be held in contempt without votes from full House.
President Trump countered the third hour of Democrats’ marathon reading of Mueller’s report with a 25 minute speech on immigration from the White House Rose Garden Thursday.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff announced Thursday his panel will vote on “enforcement action” against Barr or the Justice Department next week, after the Justice Department missed a Wednesday deadline to hand over the unredacted version of Mueller’s report.
Schiff insists he requested the report and “a dozen narrow sets of documents” that were referred in the report to determine whether the department was acting in good faith.
“The deadline came and went without the production of a single document, raising profound questions about whether the department has any intention to honor its legal obligations,” Schiff said. “If they don’t demonstrate some good faith we will be forced to compel them to honro their legal commitments.”
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