Campaign Action
Last week was a long week, but by Monday, the tide had already started to turn on Donald Trump's "complete and total exoneration" tour. Outside of the Fox News bubble, real journalists and the DC punditry had moved from marveling over Trump's good news to realizing he had clearly overplayed his hand on what was likely to be a pretty damning report from Robert Mueller once it was seen in full.
But it’s the prospect of actually seeing the 400 pages-plus in their entirety (or close to it) that made clear what a hack job Attorney General William Barr's four-page "summarization" would likely prove to be. And as former Obama aide Jesse Lee noted, without Democratic control of the House, it likely would have been years before Americans got so much as a glimpse of the real report. Instead, we would have been stuck with Barr’s evidence-free interpretation of Mueller’s determinations.
But not with Democrats in charge. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised at her Thursday press conference: "Let me just say, the Mueller report will be released ... To us it is inevitable."
This is the moment that makes all the hard work grassroots activists put into organizing and winning (big!) in 2018 worth it. Here's a quick look at Trump's week.
- Multiple news outlets reported that Barr's report didn't come anywhere close to capturing the gravity of Trump's actions
- House Judiciary Democrats approved subpoenaing Mueller's full report
- Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler called on Barr to "immediately release" the summaries Mueller's prosecutors had reportedly prepared for public release
- Ways and Means Democrats requested six years of Trump's tax returns
- House Oversight Chair Elijah Cummings said he was preparing a friendly subpoena to obtain 10 years of Trump's financial records from his accounting firm
- Pelosi announced plans to file a House legal challenge to Trump's national emergency declaration
That's called real oversight of the most blatantly corrupt president of our lifetimes, and none of it would be happening if Democrats hadn't triumphed in 2018 through a massive surge at the polls. It might take some time and perseverance to pry all this critical information loose, but Pelosi made clear that Democrats are in for the long haul.
"Show us the Mueller report. Show us the tax returns," she said Thursday, taking aim at the Trump administration. "And we're not walking away just because you say 'no' the first time around."