WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee voted 24–16 Wednesday to hold Attorney General Bill Barr in contempt for refusing to turn over an unredacted copy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report as well as Mueller’s investigative files.



The vote is the first step — the resolution will go before the full House next. If Democrats want to sue Barr and the Justice Department to enforce their subpoena, they’ll have to specifically vote to do so, regardless of the final outcome of the contempt proceedings.



On Wednesday morning, before the vote, the Justice Department sent a letter notifying the committee that President Donald Trump had asserted executive privilege over all of the information — Mueller’s unredacted report and millions of pages of underlying evidence from the investigation — covered by the subpoena.

It is the first time Trump has invoked executive privilege to shield information from Congress. It’s not the final word from the president on this information, though. The Justice Department said it was a broad, “protective” assertion of privilege to stop the records from being disclosed while the White House does a “full review.” There is precedent for this kind of move. In a letter to Trump on Wednesday, Barr cited a 1996 legal opinion from then–attorney general Janet Reno concluding that then-president Bill Clinton could assert "protective" privilege over a set of White House–counsel documents in the face of a congressional subpoena and contempt vote while the White House did a complete review.


"Faced with Chairman [Jerry] Nadler’s blatant abuse of power, and at the Attorney General’s request, the President has no other option than to make a protective assertion of executive privilege," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.



Speaking to reporters after the vote, Nadler said, "We've talked for a long time about approaching a constitutional crisis. We are now in it." Making a reference to Ben Franklin and the founding of the country, Nadler said the US is in a "time of testing whether we can keep a republic or whether this republic is destined to change into a different, more tyrannical form of government as other republics have over the centuries."

Impeaching Trump "may not be the best answer," Nadler said, but he decried overreach by the president. "We must resist this. This is far broader than Republican or Democratic or even the rights of Congress. This is whether we can put limits on the power of the president — any president — and hold the president, any president, accountable. We cannot flinch," he said.

Ranking Republican Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia said the contempt motion was due to sour grapes among Democrats because the Mueller report did not find that the Trump administration colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. Collins said that Democrats did not get grounds to impeach Trump, and “as a result, they’re angry.”



During the hearing, Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson, also of Georgia, broached the subject of impeaching Trump, in a break with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has repeatedly quashed impeachment speculation. Johnson said that Congress has constitutional responsibilities to engage in. “One of which is possibly impeachment,” he said. “How can we impeach without getting the documents? So we must get this document.”


The committee's subpoena had demanded that Barr produce the full Mueller report and other records related to the investigation by May 1. The House Judiciary Committee issued the subpoena April 18, the day Barr publicly released a redacted version of the report. Barr offered members of Congress the opportunity to read a less redacted version in private, but Democrats largely rejected the offer and demanded to see the full document.

One of the Justice Department's objections to the subpoena is that federal law prohibits the disclosure of grand jury information, which was one of the categories of redactions in the report. The subpoena doesn't exclude grand jury material, but Nadler clarified during Wednesday's hearing that Democrats weren't demanding information that would require breaking the law, and the committee adopted an amendment to that effect.

In a statement after Wednesday's contempt vote, Justice Department spokesperson Kerri Kupec said it was "deeply disappointing that elected representatives of the American people have chosen to engage in such inappropriate political theatrics."



"Regrettably, Chairman Nadler’s actions have prematurely terminated the accommodation process and forced the President to assert executive privilege to preserve the status quo. No one, including Chairman Nadler and his Committee, will force the Department of Justice to break the law," Kupec said.

A BuzzFeed News review of the public version of Mueller’s 448-page report showed that approximately a third of the pages had a redaction, and most were in the first volume, which focused on the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. The redactions ranged from a single word to an entire page. According to the Justice Department, members of Congress were allowed to see 98.5% of the report, including 99.9% of the second volume, which dealt with the investigation into whether Trump had obstructed justice.