Friday at the 2019 “Women in the World” summit, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reacted to the Trump Justice Department’s handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report since Mueller had submitted it to Attorney General William Barr.
Clinton compared it to former President Richard Nixon’s Watergate investigation and said the situation was a bit of a “Twilight Zone.”
Partial transcript as follows:
CLINTON: One of the things that I did as a very young lawyer was work on the impeachment staff of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 investigating Richard Nixon. So I know what can be made available, what the court has to be asked to permit to be made available. I know what the Republicans did when they were in charge of the Congress in demanding information from the Justice Department that had never been offered before. Very sensitive information, it was all turned over to the Republican congress.
So we’re in this bit of a Twilight Zone, aren’t we? There’s a report that depending on which figure you believe is somewhere between 300-400 pages long, and it is not being delivered to the Congress, which has an absolute right to see it. It is not being presented to the public. So I think that what we saw in Congress with the attorney general’s presentation in both the House and the Senate is someone who considers his principal duty to be protecting Donald Trump — not protecting the rule of law and the democracy that the Justice Department should be defending.
And I remember when Nixon was really upset because there was an investigation going on, and he fired people who would not do his bidding until he finally ended up with somebody who would do his bidding, but it didn’t save him because the information that had been collected was made available to the Congress, to the courts, and eventually to the public.
So I would hope that the law is followed, that the information is provided, that the American public and the press has a chance to go through these 300-400 pages with as few redactions or cross-outs as possible, and I think the Congress has to take a very hard look at what their remedies are if they are not given that information. And they do have remedies to go to court and the like, but it should not be necessary. This information should be provided.
(h/t RCP Video)
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