The Supreme Court on Friday has granted a request to drop a scheduled hearing over whether a House Committee has the right to access grand jury materials from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
The Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee has been seeking access to grand jury information redacted from Mueller’s 448-page report, including transcripts or exhibits referenced in the redactions. In July 2019, the panel filed an application for a court order to authorize the release of certain grand jury materials related to the Mueller report.
The House was seeking the documents as part of its ongoing investigations into President Donald Trump in an attempt to find impeachable offenses against him.
The lower courts had accepted that the impeachment trial qualifies under the exception, while former Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued in his brief earlier this year 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 panel argued 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.
Following the media’s projection of Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s victory in the election, the House committee said in its Nov. 17 brief that a new Congress will be constituted Jan. 3, 2021, and confident that Biden would be sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 202, it asked the justices to “recalendar” arguments in the case.
The Epoch Times is not declaring a winner of the 2020 presidential election until all results are certified and any legal challenges are resolved.