House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff had scheduled a Wednesday morning meeting for a vote to “enforce” an earlier subpoena for materials on the counterintelligence investigation connected to the Mueller report. That meeting seemed to be aimed at putting a second contempt of Congress citation on the table for Attorney General William Barr. But just hours before the meeting, Schiff said that the session has been cancelled as the Department of Justice has agreed to hand over documents.
According to CNN, the offer from the DOJ came directly from the pressure applied by Schiff. Unlike the earlier subpoena and resulting contempt vote from the House Judiciary Committee, Barr seems to have been genuinely concerned about whatever “enforcement action” Schiff had in mind, and on Tuesday indicated that the DOJ was gathering and preparing the information requested by the committee. In a letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, the DOJ offered to provide the information so long as the committee did not “take the unnecessary and unproductive step of moving to hold the Attorney General in contempt."
According to Schiff, the offer from the DOJ includes the key information requested by the original subpoena, saying, "The Department of Justice has accepted our offer of a first step towards compliance with our subpoena, and this week will begin turning over to the Committee twelve categories of counterintelligence and foreign intelligence materials as part of an initial rolling production.”
Earlier Schiff had indicated that the House Intelligence Committee had not been receiving updates on counterintelligence information since the departure of former attorney general Jefferson Sessions. But now—assuming Barr continues to produce all the material on schedule—it seems like not so much a compromise, as an acknowledgement that the Intelligence Committee was in the right all along.
On the earlier subpoena of the complete, unredacted Mueller report and the resulting contempt vote, Republicans—including Barr—maintained that the DOJ could not comply because to do so would require them to “break the law” by turning over grand jury material. Though that reading wasn’t in accord with the standard treatment of subpoenas demanding the production of information, which are generally issued broadly and reduced during court action, it seemed that Barr believed the point gave him an issue on which he could push back against the subpoena.
It may have simply been that in the case of the information requested by the House Intelligence Committee, Barr and Republicans could find no technical point on which to hang their obstruction. Republicans have recently praised Schiff and the way he has run the Intelligence Committee and joined with him in issuing the subpoena. It would have been awkward, at best, for Republicans to then sit and argue that the committee shouldn’t take action on a subpoena issued in a bipartisan fashion.
