On the eve of House Judiciary Committee issuing subpoenas for the full Mueller report, President Trump said Tuesday that Democrats are engaged in “politics at a very low level.”
“I think it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House. “We went through two years of the Mueller investigation. There’s no collusion, there’s no obstruction, and now we’re going to start this process all over again?”
While the president said he’ll abide by Attorney General William Barr’s decision on releasing the report, Mr. Trump added, “These are just Democrats that want to try and demean this country. It shouldn’t be allowed.”
Mr. Barr has said he plans to deliver a redacted version of the special counsel’s report to Congress sometime in mid-April.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, New York Democrat and Judiciary Committee chairman, has rejected that and said the panel intends to authorize subpoenas Wednesday to see the full version of the report, including the special counsel’s underlying work materials.
On a separate matter, the House Oversight and Reform Committee voted Tuesday to authorize a subpoena for a former White House official to testify in an investigation into the administration’s security clearance process.
The committee voted 22-15 along party lines to authorize a subpoena for former White House Personnel Security Director Carl Kline. The vote comes after Chairman Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland revealed that a White House career official, Tricia Newbold, spoke privately with the committee about 25 alleged lapses in granting security clearances.
The panel wants to investigate security clearances granted to several White House officials including presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who said he complied with all ethics rules in divesting a portion of his businesses.
“I disclosed all of my holdings for the Office of Government Ethics, and what I did with them is they told me what to divest, what to keep, what rules to follow,” Mr. Kushner said on Fox News on Monday night. “We followed all that.”
The president said Democrat will never be satisfied, singling out Mr. Nadler and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, California Democrat, in their push for the entire Mueller work product.
“Nothing you can give them, whether it’s ’shifty Schiff’ or Jerry Nadler — he’s been fighting me for half of my life in Manhattan … not successfully,” Mr. Trump said. “Anything we give them will never be enough. It’s a 400 page report? We could give them 800 pages and it wouldn’t be enough. This is just politics at a very low level.”
The president said his only disappointment with the Mueller report is that it didn’t examine the origins of the FBI counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, including wiretaps on a campaign official.
“I hope they now go and take a look at the origins of the investigation … whether it’s [former FBI deputy director Andrew] McCabe, or [former FBI director James] Comey, or a lot of them,” the president said. “How high up in the White House did it go? That’s the only thing that’s disappointing to me about the Mueller report. I wish it covered the origins of the investigation. It didn’t cover that. For some reason, none of that was discussed.”
Mr. Trump challenged reporters to look into the question, asserting it was an effort to negate his election.
“You will all get Pulitzer Prizes,” he said. “You should have looked at it a long time ago. You should look at the beginnings and where it started, some very bad people started something that should have never been started … I hope that’s going to continue forward. People did things that were very, very bad for our country and very, very illegal. You could even say treasonous.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Democrats moving forward with subpoenas for the Mueller report “shows again what sore losers the Democrats really are,”
“They got beat in 2016 because we had a better candidate with a better message and a better vision for America,” she told Fox News. “Now we’re seeing that they’ve gotten beat again when it comes to the Mueller report. They were convinced, not only were they convinced but they went out and they lied about what they expected the Mueller report to tell America, and they got it wrong.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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