House Judiciary Democrats to Authorize Subpoenas for Mueller Report, Former White House Advisers

House Judiciary Committee Democrats are planning to authorize subpoenas on Wednesday to obtain the full Special Counsel report, as well as to compel testimony from several former White House officials, according to reports.

The move, first reported by Politico, would allow Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) to issue a subpoena for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full report, as well as to subpoena five former White House officials.

Those officials are: Former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, former Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon, former Communications Director Hope Hicks, former White House Counsel Don McGahn, and McGahn’s former deputy, Ann Donaldson.

Nadler would not necessarily issue the subpoenas right away, but Wednesday’s vote would allow him to issue them at any time.

Democrats had previously set a deadline for Attorney General William Barr to release Mueller’s report by Tuesday, April 2, but on Friday, Barr sent a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees saying he intends to release the report by mid-April, if not sooner.

In a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, Barr said he intended to release the report after scrubbing it for four categories of information, including:

(1) material subject to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) that by law cannot be made public; (2) material the intelligence community identifies as potentially compromising sensitive sources and methods, (3) material that could affect other ongoing matters, including those that the Special Counsel has referred to other Department offices; and (4) information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.

Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the top Republican on the committee, slammed Democrats on the committee as “desperate.”

“Judiciary Democrats have escalated from setting arbitrary deadlines to demanding unredacted material that Congress does not, in truth, require and that the law does not allow to be shared outside the Justice Department,” he said in a statement.

“It’s unfortunate that a body meant to uphold the law has grown so desperate that it’s patently misrepresenting the law, even as the attorney general has already demonstrated transparency above what is required,” he added.