Giuliani ally: Congress must obtain all 400 pages of Mueller’s report

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been a major critic of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which recently concluded. But in an early April article for Politico, a former federal prosecutor who Giuliani hired, Nelson W. Cunningham, argues that House Democrats deserve to see Mueller’s final report—although he stresses that classified information in the report must be protected.

Attorney General William Barr, on March 29, sent a letter to Congress saying that he plans to give a redacted copy of Mueller’s report to Congress by mid-April. And many House Democrats have responded that they want to see the report in its entirety.

Cunningham (who reported to Giuliani as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York) opens his Politico piece by saying that “for public release of the Mueller report,” Barr “has no choice but to redact classified information” and that doing so is “not optional—it’s the law, designed to protect both the secrecy of grand jury proceedings and our nation’s security.”

Cunningham acknowledges that “redacted documents are not just hard to read, they are almost impossible to understand or to comprehend.” However, the former Southern District prosecutor says that while “Congressional Democrats are right to demand the full report,” they “are wrong to ask the attorney general to violate the law.” Cunningham’s solution: Barr can “redact the Mueller report for public review” but give an unredacted version to important committees like the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.

Democrats in Congress, Cunningham stresses, “should demand the full report, but only for their own use. They should use it as a road map for their own investigation, and they should not wait.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chairman Mark Warner, Cunningham writes, “should demand the unredacted report for their own committees”—and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler should also “get his hands on the report.”

Cunningham concludes his piece by saying that “the judiciary and intelligence committees are entitled to everything Mueller has produced, unredacted. Chairs Nadler and Schiff should immediately assert their rights and subpoena the full Mueller report and underlying evidence. And then, their important work can begin.”