The House intelligence committee is considering asking Special Counsel Robert Mueller to testify following the submission of his report to the Department of Justice, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) told The Daily Beast on Sunday evening.
Attorney General William Barr gave a summary of Mueller’s report to congressional leaders, saying the special counsel’s investigation did not find the president or members of his campaign coordinated with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said they considered Mueller’s evidence against Trump on obstruction of justice to be “insufficient.”
Mueller said his report “does not exonerate” Trump over the question, according to Barr.
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Krishnamoorthi said Barr’s summary leaves open questions the committee wants answered.
“We hope Mueller would testify before us about the letter [from Barr] and the findings of the investigation,” Krishnamoorthi said, adding that the committee wants access to Mueller’s report and the underlying documents.
“The American people deserve to see it especially when Attorney General Barr quotes Mueller saying that the office cannot exonerate president when it comes to obstruction of justice,” he said. “We’re focused on the question of how do we prevent what happened in 2016 from ever happening again?”
Beyond demanding access to the report, Krishnamoorthi said the committee is focused on getting an understanding of what counterintelligence information Mueller received during the course of his two-year probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
“Our mission is far broader than what Mueller was looking at,” he said. “We have to look at counterintelligence issues. That’s part of why where’re bringing [Felix] Sater in next week.”
Sater was a witness in the Mueller investigation and is set to testify about his relationship with Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, regarding their efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 election.
Krishnamoorthi also said that the committee is increasingly focused on the investigation into potential money laundering by Trump and his associates.
“We’re always looking to see if people in our government are compromised in any way—in this case, foreign adversaries. We want to see what is the nature of the dealings and whether any information associated with those dealings or business transactions are potentially damaging to them and have not been publicly disclosed.”
