U.S. President Richard Nixon during Press Conference Regarding Middle East Crisis and Watergate, 1973.

Justice Department lawyers on Tuesday used the example of Richard Nixon's impeachment inquiry to argue that the House Judiciary Committee should be denied its request to obtain information about grand jury materials assembled under special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of President Donald Trump.

Lawyers from the Justice Department surprised the judge, Beryl Howell, by arguing that the decision by former Chief Judge John Sirica to release normally secret grand jury materials to the House in 1974, when Nixon faced impeachment, was incorrect, and that those materials should have been kept from Congress at the time, according to NBC News.

Those materials were considered the "roadmap" that led to Nixon's expected impeachment that year. Nixon ended up resigning after before he was formally impeached.

"Wow," Howell said after the hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that the Justice Department now disagreed with Sirica's ruling.

"As I said, the department is taking extraordinary positions in this case," Howell said.

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The Judiciary Committee is seeking the Mueller grand jury information as part of its ongoing impeachment inquiry into Trump. That information would include transcripts of testimony by witnesses to the grand jury.

Douglas Letter, a lawyer for the committee, told Howell that the House of Representatives is entitled to "absolute deference" in impeachment inquiries, according to NBC News.

But Elizabeth Shapiro, an attorney in the DOJ's civil division, argued to Howell that in order to properly seek the grand jury material the House should first vote on a resolution authorizing a formal impeachment inquiry, and then seek the material through a judicial proceeding.

Letter disputed that idea.

"We are in an impeachment inquiry, an impeachment investigation, a formal impeachment investigation, because the House says it is," Letter said.

Howell ended the hearing without making a decision on the House's request.

The impeachment inquiry kicked off two weeks ago after it was revealed that Trump, who had been withholding congressionally appropriated military aid from Ukraine, pressured that country's newly elected president in July to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.