Analysis: The House voted 420-0 to release the Mueller report. So why is Lindsey Graham blocking it?
By Aaron Blake Aaron Blake Senior political reporter, writing for The Fix Email Bio Follow March 15 at 10:15 AM On Thursday, the House passed a bill urging the public disclosure of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. It did so nearly unanimously — the vote was 420-0. The four members who didn’t vote for it instead voted “present.”
But politically speaking, there are many reasons Graham should want to vote for this, and now. One is that it’s not binding, so it wouldn’t technically change much of anything. Why not just vote on something that merely expresses a pro-disclosure posture? Almost every House Republican was only so happy to do so on Thursday. They may have been more worried about what it would have looked like to vote against it, but this was about as close to a consensus bill as you can get.
The second-ranking House Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise , pointed to the perils of non-disclosure after Thursday’s vote. “After taking nearly two years, costing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and providing limited public information about its scope," he said,"I am especially concerned about what would happen if the report was not made available to Congress.”
Graham’s demand for a special counsel to look into alleged Justice Department wrongdoing is clearly a politically motivated one. There is already a U.S. attorney looking into these things, but Graham wants to make the argument that Democrats aren’t curious about potential wrongdoing within the top levels of U.S. law enforcement.
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