The Democratic head of the House Judiciary Committee said Thursday that special counsel Robert Mueller, who has completed his investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 election, "wants to testify in private" to lawmakers.

In an interview on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show," Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. , who chairs the panel, said "There are a lot of people who should come in and testify who the administration is saying they will not permit to testify.

"They're blanket stonewalling . . . Congress and the American people," he said of the Trump administration. "The president was foolish enough to admit that he was engaged in stonewalling including [former White House counsel Donald] McGahn and a lot of other people."

"Mueller, I think I can say at this point, that he wants to testify in private," Nadler declared.

"He's willing to make an opening statement but he wants to testify in private," he added. "We're saying he ought to – we think it's important for the American people to hear from him and to hear his answers to questions about the report."

Though Mueller wants his testimony private, there would be a transcript of it, Nadler said.

"He envisions himself correctly as a man of great rectitude and apolitical and he doesn't want to participate in anything that he might regard as a political spectacle, especially if Republicans on the committee start asking him questions about the beginning of the investigation.

"I'm speculating really. But he doesn't want to be public in what some people will regard as a political spectacle, I think," he said.

He added he believes the committee "probably" hear from Mueller's investigators as well.

"I think we'll probably hear from them and a lot of other people," Nadler said. "Our intention is to open all of this up to the American people, to have everybody relevant testify so people understand what was in the Mueller report, what wasn't in the Mueller report, to understand what was going on."