Mulvaney says Congress is "not entitled to see" full Mueller report - transcript
CBS NEWS CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT MAJOR GARRETT INTERVIEWS ACTING WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF MICK MULVANEY
WED. MAY 8, 2019
WASHINGTON, D.C.
MAJOR GARRETT: So the White House has exerted -- or assigned to itself -- executive privilege over some of the requested documents from the House Judiciary Committee. Is that in perpetuity? They're never going to see them. That's just it -- going to be it?
MICK MULVANEY: Yeah, I would think so. I mean, they're not entitled to see them. Keep in mind what they're asking for. My understanding is that they're asking for the unredacted Mueller report. The Mueller report was very lightly redacted in the first place.
GARRETT: And the underlying evidence?
MULVANEY: Right, well let's deal with that in a second, okay? Which is -- the Mueller report was lightly redacted in the first place and redacted for reasons that everybody agrees are the right reasons to redact it. I think most of the redactions -- it was very light -- I think it's less than 10 percent of the report was redacted in the first place. But almost all of that was redactions related to ongoing criminal investigations -- mostly, I think Michael Cohen and a couple other people.
That's the law. The other part that's redacted is grand jury testimony, which is also legally supposed to be redacted. So the stuff that Congress saw is the stuff that everybody who's got any sense about them knows needed by law to be redacted. We then made it available in an unredacted fashion I think to a couple of very high-ranking members of the committee.
GARRETT: Right, which they found insufficient.
MULVANEY: I'm not sure how they find it insufficient. It's everything that there is. I'm not sure how they find it insufficient. It's everything that there is. Now, that goes to the second part of your question about the underlying documents and stuff, and this is where we sort of draw an even firmer line. They are not the Department of Justice. They do have a -- they do have a right -- by the way, it's not in the Constitution. It's been implied in the Constitution by the Supreme Court to have some oversight.
GARRETT: Yes.
MULVANEY: Okay.
GARRETT: It is implied and precedential. It's not in the Constitution.
MULVANEY: Bingo. They have the right to do that. That's fine. That doesn't mean they get to second-guess the Department of Justice. That doesn't mean they get to sort of supplement their decision for the decision of the attorney general. They are not the executive branch of government. They are there to make law, and their oversight is supposed to be related to their process of making law, and that's not what happened - that's not what's happening right now.
...
MULVANEY: My exposure to what you read about in the Mueller report comes from reading the Mueller report. I haven't talked to anybody about it afterwards because there's no reason to and I was no involved with it then. I'm not even in the bibliography, I don't think. So I'm getting it all sort of through the Mueller report.
GARRETT: Right. But you've been around the president, and none of that reads to you like fiction --
MULVANEY: Oh -- it -- in terms of the president's behavior, no. In terms of what people said -- 'Well, I went home, and I wrote a memo, and I put it in a safe' -- I have no idea, 'cause I don't know if that's fiction or not.
For more of Major's wide-ranging conversation with Mick Mulvaney, including his assertions that the White House exerted executive privilege on Mueller documents because Congress is "not entitled" to the information, and that the U.S. "will not go war with Iran," download "The Takeout" podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or Spotify. New episodes are available every Friday morning. Also, you can watch "The Takeout" on CBSN Friday at 5pm, 9pm, and 12am ET and Saturday at 1pm, 9pm, and 12am ET. For a full archive of "The Takeout" episodes, visit www.takeoutpodcast.com. And you can listen to "The Takeout" on select CBS News Radio affiliates (check your local listings).
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