By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
Nelson Cunningham is no stranger to federal law enforcement or Capitol Hill. He served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York under Rudy Giuliani and was general counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee under chair, Sen. Joseph Biden. And oh yes, he was general counsel of the White House under Bill Clinton.
Now, he’s jumping into the debate over the Mueller report, saying Congress should get it unredacted.
In a column in Politico he writes:
Attorney General William Barr is right: For public release of the Mueller report, he has no choice but to redact classified information, and also grand jury information pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e). It’s not optional — it’s the law, designed to protect both the secrecy of grand jury proceedings and our nation’s security.
But those of us who have pored over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s earlier court filings know that redacted documents are not just hard to read, they are almost impossible to understand or to comprehend. In other words, they will absolutely not satisfy the public cry for information.
Congressional Democrats are right to demand the full report – but they are wrong to ask the attorney general to violate the law. Instead, they should learn from the lessons of Watergate and the example of Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski and House Judiciary Chair Peter Rodino. They 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.
