The Supreme Court on Wednesday temporarily prevented the House of Representatives from obtaining secret grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
The court’s order keeps previously undisclosed details from the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election out of the hands of Democratic lawmakers at least until early summer. The court will decide then whether to extend its hold.
House Democrats told the Supreme Court on Monday they need secret grand jury materials from Mueller’s investigation to determine if there is new evidence of impeachable offenses against President Donald Trump.
The House Judiciary Committee, according to CNN, has been seeking to obtain the documents in a legal fight that has now made its way to the nation's highest court.
The court filing comes after a federal appeals court ruled last month the committee had a "compelling need" to view the Mueller committee's secret testimony.
Trump’s Justice Department asked the court to block the release of the materials, saying it would suffer “irreparable harm” if it had to turn over the grand jury records before the justices had decided whether to take up the appeal.
Earlier this year, Trump was acquitted, mostly along party lines, on two Democrat-led articles of impeachment. Trump was charged with abuse of power, as Democrats alleged Trump "solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 U.S. presidential election."
Democrats also charged Trump with obstruction of Congress.
As this fall’s historic presidential election draws closer, Democrats seem to be renewing another effort to politically damage the president.
In March, a federal judge sharply rebuked Attorney General William Barr’s handling of the special counsel’s Russia report, saying Barr had made “misleading public statements” to spin the investigation’s findings in favor of Trump and had shown a “lack of candor.”
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton delivered the criticism in a 23-page order in which he directed the Justice Department to provide him with an unredacted version of the report so that he could decide if any additional information from the document could be publicly disclosed.
In his opinion, the judge said he struggled to reconcile Barr’s public characterizations of the report — which included his statement that Mueller found “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia — with what the document actually said.
Those inconsistencies, Walton wrote, “cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.”
The scolding was unusually blunt, with Walton saying Barr had appeared to make a “calculated attempt” to influence public opinion about the report in ways favorable to Trump. The rebuke tapped into lingering criticism of Barr, from Democrats in Congress and Mueller himself, that he had misrepresented some of the investigation’s most damning findings.
In his ruling, Walton said he needed to review the entire document itself because he could not trust that the Justice Department’s redactions of the report were made properly and in good faith. The judge said it would be “disingenuous” to presume the redactions were “not tainted by Attorney General Barr’s actions and representations” throughout the process.
The actions cited by the judge include Barr’s release in March of a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings before the larger redacted report was released to the public.
The letter said Mueller had found insufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to tip the 2016 election, and that Mueller had not reached a determination on the question of whether the president had obstructed justice.
The Justice Department in April released the full 448-page redacted version of Mueller’s report, which examined ties between Russia and the 2016 presidential campaign and potential obstruction of justice by the president.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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