Attorney General William Barr broke his silence after House Democrats, led by Jerry Nadler, held him in contempt.
This unprecedented step had only been taken once by Congress, when Eric Holder and Obama refused to turn over information on Fast and Furious.
The difference is that the GOP Congress tried to negotiate for two years before taking the drastic step of holding Eric Holder in contempt.
AG Barr joked on the subject on Thursday during a farewell ceremony for his Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, as reported by The Washington Post.
“You like records,” Barr said at the Justice Department event, referring to Rosenstein. “This must be a record for an attorney general being proposed for contempt within a hundred days of taking office.”
After the Justice Department defied a subpoena to hand over special counsel Mueller’s unredacted report for the Russia investigation, the House Judiciary Committee voted to cite AG Barr for contempt of Congress, but did so along party lines. Meanwhile, the White House asserted executive privilege over Mueller’s findings.
Republicans voted against the contempt resolution, arguing that the Dems only intend to drag out the Mueller probe, which found no criminal conspiracy between the President Trump’s campaign and Russia, but made no determination about whether President Trump tried to obstruct the investigation.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, spoke for the press and told them that the United States is now in a “constitutional crisis.”
As Fox News reported, Nadler took a very different stance on contempt in 2012, when House Republicans took the same step against then-AG Holder for refusing to hand over documents related to the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal.
“Just joined the #walkout of the House chamber to protest the shameful, politically-motivated GOP vote holding AG [Eric] Holder in contempt,” Nadler tweeted in 2012.
He joined more than 100 Democrats in walking out over the vote to hold the Obama-era DOJ leader in contempt.
Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, argued House Republicans were more politically motivated in attacking Holder than driven to get to the bottom of the failed operation.
“What is happening here is shameful,” said Nancy Pelosi.
