After Michigan Republican Justin Amash said the Mueller report proved President Trump had met the threshold for impeachment and accused Republicans of not reading the Mueller report, the Washington Post surveyed lawmakers to see just who has read it, and I’m dying to know because I’ve been pushing for this exact question to be asked.
FINALLY!
More than a quarter of key lawmakers wouldn’t say if they had read it or not, according to Scott Clement, Emily Guskin and Kevin Uhrmacher in the Washington Post.
In a canvass of “House and Senate members on the relevant committees — the Judiciary and Intelligence committees in both chambers” they found most claimed they had read the report in its entirety.
So that seems great.
But wait. Then, not so easily swayed, the reporters asked yes or no questions about the report and “over 3 in 10 declined to respond to five yes-or-no questions after repeated contact attempts, offered unclear answers or said they have not read the full report.”
Oh. These lawmakers on important committees haven’t even bothered to read the redacted, publicly Mueller report that many citizens have read.
They reported that 3 out of 4 Republican chairmen or ranking Republican members on the Judiciary and Intelligence committees did NOT respond when asked how they reviewed the report.
One senior Democratic senator said he had read the executive summaries but not the full report with redactions.
The report was released over a month ago, on April 18, 2019. Here’s a link to Volume One and Volume Two.
In Volume One, contrary to handpicked Attorney General William Barr’s non-summary summary, a legal expert found evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
Ryan Goodman, former Special Counsel for the Department of Defense and co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, wrote Monday that Volume One of the redacted Mueller report “identifies key findings of collusion (not just crimes)…
1. Trump was receptive to a Campaign national security adviser’s (George Papadopoulos) pursuit of a back channel to Putin
2. Kremlin operatives provided the Campaign a preview of the Russian plan to distribute stolen emails”
That seems like something that lawmakers on the Judiciary and Intelligence committees would want to know more about. Crimes and collusion with a foreign, hostile enemy. Yep, that’s something any normal patriot would be concerned about. But not this gang.
Volume Two laid out possible obstruction of justice committed by President Trump, and left it to…
Congress to deal with.
You know, the folks who haven’t read the report.
It looks like Justin Amash was correct when he said that some Republicans had privately agreed with him on impeachment, “There are people who are still reviewing (the Mueller report). I’ve had people who, after I made my tweets said, ‘Boy, they’d better review it more carefully now and they hadn’t really gone through it before.’ I mean, volume two speaks for itself.”
They hadn’t really reviewed it carefully before. Even though it is a document crafted by a Republican that probes into the Republican President’s possible collusion with a hostile foreign country and then additionally, his possible obstruction of justice. I say possible even though plenty of Trump’s obstruction occurred in public because I’m referring to the legal bar, not the reasonable knowledge bar.
Some lawmakers claimed to have read the report, but couldn’t answer questions about it. Others wouldn’t even say if they had read it or not. Three out of four chairmen and ranking Republicans wouldn’t even respond when asked how they reviewed the report.
These people are being paid by you to protect this country, perform oversight of the executive branch, and do things like read this BFD report.
They should be protested until they read it in full and can answer questions about it and defend their Do-Nothing, Close-Eyes response to Trump’s obvious national security threat.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are refusing to even schedule a hearing for an election security bill and election security is massively underfunded and “at a breaking point.”
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
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