Pelosi: Court ruling a blow to ‘Trump’s attempt to put himself above the law’

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) touted a federal court ruling ordering the Department of Justice (DOJ) to provide Congress with redacted information from Robert Mueller’s special counsel report as a blow against President Trump’s efforts to fight the House’s oversight efforts.

“Today’s ruling in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is another blow to President Trump’s attempt to put himself above the law,” Pelosi said in a statement Friday.

{mosads}“This critical court ruling affirms Congress’s authority to expose the truth for the American people,” she continued. “Most importantly, the Court recognized the House’s right to obtain grand jury information pursuant to its impeachment inquiry.”

The statement comes after D.C. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama appointee, ruled that House Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have a justifiable reason for obtaining the records related to Mueller’s grand jury now that they are conducting an impeachment probe into the president.

“In carrying out the weighty constitutional duty of determining whether impeachment of the President is warranted, Congress need not redo the nearly two years of effort spent on the Special Counsel’s investigation, nor risk being misled by witnesses, who may have provided information to the grand jury and the Special Counsel that varies from what they tell [the House Judiciary Committee],” Howell wrote in her decision.

The Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress have said officials do not have to cooperate with the House’s investigation, arguing that it is illegitimate until authorized by a vote in the House. 

The DOJ rolled out that argument to the district court last month, writing in a filing that “impeachments of Presidents Clinton and Andrew Johnson were investigated in multiple phases with each phase authorized by the House’s adoption of resolutions.”

However, Howell dismissed that argument Friday, ordering the DOJ to hand over all information that was redacted from the Mueller report in order to protect grand jury secrecy.

“Even were this statement accurate, which it is not, the manner in which the House has chosen to conduct impeachment inquiries encompasses more than past Presidents and no sound legal or constitutional reason has been presented to distinguish the House’s exercise of impeachment authority for a President from the exercise of such authority more generally,” she wrote.