Nadler: ‘No choice’ but to move forward with Barr contempt vote

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday told CNN that the House panel has “no choice” but to vote to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress, shortly before the panel was slated to vote on the issue.

{mosads}He accused the attorney general of using the Justice Department to protect the president, calling it “just another instance of lawlessness” by the Trump administration.

“Attorney General Barr has made the entire Justice Department an agency for enabling the president to defy the law, to defy and kind of accountability and to act as a monarch,” Nadler told CNN’s “New Day,” saying “we have no choice” but to proceed with the vote.

House Judiciary Chairman @RepJerryNadler says “we have no choice” but to move forward with a vote today to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress.

Pres. Trump “wants to make himself a king, and Congress cannot permit that,” Nadler says https://t.co/scCom1AmWM pic.twitter.com/4w1Rmis2Ck

— New Day (@NewDay) May 8, 2019

The Justice Department, Nadler said, “made it twice as necessary to proceed with this contempt, because you cannot have a government in which the president can conceal all information about his own wrongdoing and about anything else.”

Trump, Nadler added, “wants to make himself a king, and Congress cannot permit that, nor can the American people abide that.”

Nadler conceded that settling the matter in the court system “could take a while, but I have no doubt as to the outcome … this is not new law, this is well-established old law.”

He said the Justice Department, contrary to its claims, has made “no reasonable accommodations” to answer a committee subpoena calling for the release of an unredacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this morning that she thought that Barr should be held in contempt of Congress in relation to his failure to release the unredacted report and raised the prospect of impeaching Barr if necessary.

The Justice Department threatened Tuesday evening to invoke executive privilege to restrict Congress’s access to the redacted portions of Mueller’s findings.