All six Senate Democrats running for the presidential nomination in 2020 are calling for the public release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report, findings first shared with the Department of Justice on Friday.
2020 Democrats want the Mueller report to be public
“Release the Mueller report to the American public. Now.”
Li Zhou is a former politics reporter at Vox, where she covers Congress and elections. Previously, she was a tech policy reporter at Politico and an editorial fellow at the Atlantic.
Every single 2020 hopeful in the upper chamber — including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand — emphasized the need for transparency when it comes to the report’s disclosure, an issue Democrats have been hammering for months because of concerns that parts of the report unfavorable to President Trump could be suppressed.
“This should be made public immediately,” Booker, one of three 2020 candidates who also sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, tweeted. Other senators quickly echoed the same sentiments, as did Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
Democrats are so concerned about the report’s release that they repeatedly questioned Attorney General William Barr about his plans to share it during his confirmation hearing earlier last year. Barr, at the time, declined to commit to full publication of the report and said he would only make “as much information available as [he] can.”
What exactly that looks like could be apparent in the coming days.
In a letter to congressional heads of the House and Senate Judiciary committees on Friday, Barr said he was in the process of reading the report and could be able to offer chairs and ranking members guidance on it “as soon as this weekend.”
“I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend,” he wrote.
As Vox’s Alex Ward has written, the full report isn’t necessarily meant to be shared broadly at this stage:
One thing to note here is that the report is meant for the attorney general’s eyes only at this point — not Congress and not the public. The only specific information we have on its contents is that it should explain Mueller’s “prosecution and declination decisions,” but the level of detail it will include is not clear.
There could be portions of the report that need to be classified, and DOJ policy that requires sections of it to remain concealed, Vox’s Andrew Prokop reports. Democrats, however, have emphasized that greater transparency about what it contains is vital for a fair review of its contents.
“The American people deserve to know the facts,” Klobuchar tweeted.
