The Supreme Court on Wednesday has agreed to temporarily shield grand jury documents from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation from being disclosed to Congress.
The court has given the Trump administration until 5 p.m. June 1 to file the appeal. It did not give reasons for its decision.
While arguing for the temporary stay, Solicitor General Noel Francisco said that letting the lower court’s order take effect, which was scheduled for May 11, would “irrevocably lift their secrecy and possibly frustrate the government’s ability to seek further review.”
The main question in the present case is whether an impeachment trial is a judicial proceeding. Grand jury materials are usually guarded with great secrecy and are only disclosed under exceptional circumstances. One of the exceptions that allow for disclosure is when the documents are being sought in connection to a judicial proceeding.
The lower courts had accepted that the impeachment trial qualifies under the exception, while Francisco argued in his brief that it does not.
“The ordinary meaning of ‘judicial proceeding’ is a proceeding before a court—not an impeachment trial before elected legislators,” he wrote. “The court of appeals’ interpretation defies that ordinary meaning, and creates needless contradictions with the other instances of ‘judicial proceeding’ in Rule 6(e)(3) itself.”
The House Judiciary Committee filed a response to the application on Monday, arguing that the administration does not meet the standard for a stay and that the DOJ had failed to demonstrate why the court’s review should be warranted.
House lawyers told the court that the committee had put in place procedures to protect the confidentiality of the grand jury materials. They added that the information was needed to “complete its impeachment investigation” of the president for alleged misconduct detailed in the Mueller report.
Mueller was appointed in 2017 to investigate allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. The special counsel’s report concluded that there was no evidence for such collusion.
This case is one of many House Democrat court battles seeking material and information from the president and his administration.