Donald Trump and Fox News are spreading lies about the actions of Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler when it comes to the report issued 20 years ago by special investigator Ken Starr. The statements are an attempt to confuse the public and dismiss Nadler’s call for releasing the Mueller report to Congress. At the same time, Trump is signaling he may still move to stop the release of the report entirely.
Nadler has been adamant in his demand that Attorney General William Barr produce the entire unredacted special counsel report for Congress by Tuesday, April 2. Nadler has made it clear he will not accept a report that is cut down, summarized, redacted, or delayed, and he’s been upfront in his willingness to issue a subpoena in order to obtain the full report.
But Trump’s supporters on Fox and Friends have been pushing the idea that Nadler “is a hypocrite,” because in 1998 he made statements against the release of the complete Starr report. Trump repeated these claims in Tuesday morning tweets, saying that Nadler “strongly opposed the release of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton. No information whatsoever would or could be legally released.“ It shouldn’t be surprising that none of that is correct.
The source for both Trump and Fox appears to be a piece in the right-wing Washington Examiner claiming that Nadler “vociferously opposed the release of the full Starr Report” in 1998. However, what the Examiner isn’t saying is that Nadler made the statement days after the full, unredacted release was already in the hands of Congress. After reading the full report, Nadler argued that a public release needed to be redacted, particularly to protect witnesses and sources. And he argued against the release of grand jury testimony on unrelated topics that had not been followed up by investigators. However, neither statement applied to the report provided to Congress, which got the full, unredacted report, along with grand jury materials, within days of its completion.
It’s clear that a public release of the Mueller report will be redacted, at least to the extent that it protects intelligence sources and methods. What Nadler and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who also came in for an attack in the same morning tweet despite not having been in Congress in 1998, have argued is that Congress deserves the full report. Just like it got in 1998.
Trump’s repeating of the story as it aired on Fox and Friends went beyond just trying to blur this distinction between the report as delivered to Congress and the report provided to the public. In his tweets, Trump echoed a threat he made last week by saying that “nothing will satisfy” Democrats and that “It is now time to focus exclusively on properly running our great Country!”
These statements from Trump show that he is still thinking of blocking the release of the Mueller report in any form. The Barr letter—the letter that Barr has since been quick to say is “not a summary” of the Mueller report—gave Trump and his supporters everything they could want. Barr delivered on his promise to dismiss out of hand any idea that Trump might obstruct justice, and by very narrowly defining the issue of conspiracy also gave Trump a pass on that front.
But in doing so, Barr revealed not even one complete sentence of the report delivered by Robert Mueller, leaving the actual findings of the investigation a total mystery. That’s exactly how Trump likes it.
What Barr is arguing now is that the report he hands to Congress must first receive the treatment that the Starr report was given before it was released to the public. And Trump and right-wing sources are following along to try and blur those lines. Meanwhile, Trump is still holding out the possibility that he may just shut down the release completely.
After all, at this point, blocking the release would be just one more scandal for Trump. For a nation already thoroughly boiled by a daily Gish gallop’s worth of shame, it’s not even clear that blocking the report’s release would merit ten minutes on the news before the next outlandish Trump statement replaced it.