During his confirmation hearings, Attorney General William Barr implied he may keep Robert Mueller’s highly anticipated Russia report in-house, vowing to protect the probe but making no promises that the American people will get a taste of its findings. But as the inquiry comes to a close, House Democrats are vowing to make the special counsel’s findings public, whether the administration likes it or not. “We will obviously subpoena the report,” Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said on This Week Sunday. “We will bring Bob Mueller in to testify before Congress. We will take it to court if necessary. And in the end, I think the [Justice] Department understands they’re going to have to make this public. I think Barr will ultimately understand that, as well.”

The congressman’s remarks foreshadowed what could soon be a tooth-and-nail fight between Democrats and Donald Trump, a subject of the probe who would prefer that the report remain under wraps. He’s long railed against Mueller’s “witch hunt,” publicly seeking to undermine the probe as it’s brought down one associate after another—most recently Roger Stone, who was indicted last month on charges stemming from his contacts with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. In what appears to be an effort to get on the good side of his attorney general, who oversees Mueller’s work and will decide the fate of his report, Trump has taken to effusively praising Barr—a notably different approach than the one he took with his last attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein. “He’s a tremendous man and a tremendous person who really respects this country and respects the justice system,” Trump told reporters of Barr last week. “So [releasing the report or not will] be totally up to him.”

Of course, flattery doesn’t work quite as well as a subpoena, and Democrats, who control the House of Representatives, have the power to make good on their threats. “We are going to get to the bottom of this,” Schiff said. “We are going to share this information with the public. And if the president is serious about all of his claims of exoneration, then he should welcome the publication of this report.” Mueller’s findings are still ambiguous, but Trump’s team has long been said to be bracing for the worst—a mindset reflected, perhaps, in the president’s seemingly relentless efforts to rein in investigators. If the special counsel’s report is indeed damning, it could deal a crippling blow to the Trump presidency. “If the Special Counsel has reason to believe that the President has engaged in criminal or other serious misconduct, then the President must be subject to accountability either in a court or to the Congress,” Schiff and other top Democrats wrote in a letter to the D.O.J. last week demanding that the results be made public. “The President is not above the law.”

More Great Stories from Vanity Fair

— A Republican mission to stop Trump?

— Howard Schultz defends his controversial potential presidential bid

— The suspected leaker of Jeff Bezos’s texts has his own theory about the affair

— Yes, Kamala Harris did inhale

— The shocking details behind the double kidnapping of an Idaho teen

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.