Incoming House intelligence chair says he would do all in his power to make report of inquiry into collusion with Russia public

Incoming House intelligence chair Adam Schiff plans to use his subpoena powers to fight the Trump administration should it attempt to keep secret the final report of the investigation into collusion with Russia.

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Schiff told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday he would do all in his power to make the final report by special counsel Robert Mueller open to public scrutiny, whatever efforts are taken by Donald Trump to squash it.

“I’m prepared to make sure we do everything possible so that the public has the advantage of as much of the information as it can,” Schiff said. “This case is too important to keep from the American people.”

Under the rules governing special counsel investigations, Trump’s appointment in charge of the Mueller investigation, acting attorney general Matt Whitaker, is under no obligation to make the final report public or even show it to Congress. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has threatened that the White House might use executive power to block elements of the report from seeing the light of day.

But the White House will now have a formidable opponent, once Schiff becomes chairman of the House intelligence committee on 3 January. His pledge to use his powers to wrestle the Mueller findings into the public domain sets the stage for a fierce legal battle.

Mueller is looking into whether there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election, and whether Trump tried to obstruct justice by asking the then FBI director James Comey to go easy on the former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

It is not known how close Mueller is to completing his investigation. But there have been indications it might be within the next few months, at which point he would send his report to his boss, the attorney general.

The question of what happens to the final Mueller report has been given added urgency given recent revelations about prevailing attitudes in the attorney general’s office. According to CNN, Trump has had face-to-face rows with Whitaker on at least two occasions, in which the president expressed his anger that Whitaker was not doing enough to rein in federal investigators.

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CNN said Trump was “venting” about legal investigations he believes are unfair to him.

Schiff said on Sunday discussions between the US president and the acting head of the justice department over a case that implicated the president himself would be “wrong on every level”.

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“It will taint anything that this acting attorney general does in the investigation,” he said. “This is a real assault on the rule of law.”

Schiff added: “This is exactly what we feared about Whitaker’s appointment – that he was picked not because he was qualified for the job, he really wasn’t, but because he was auditioning on TV talking down the Mueller investigation and about how he could privately cripple the investigation.”

It was reported this week that Whitaker had been advised to recuse himself from the Mueller investigation, on ethics grounds, but had rebuffed the advice.

Trump has indicated that he intends to replace Whitaker with a new permanent attorney general, William Barr. But that could also prove contentious in terms of Barr’s approach to the Mueller inquiry.

The Wall Street Journal last week uncovered an unsolicited memo written by Barr last June in which he expressed strong criticism of Mueller. Barr opined that Mueller’s reading of the law was “grossly irresponsible” and accused the special counsel of being an “overly-zealous prosecutor”.