SCOTUS runs interference on Mueller grand jury evidence until after election day

This morning the Supreme Court issued orders from the justices’ private conference on Wednesday.

Five cases were granted cert for the next term beginning in October, but the one grant of notable interest is the appeal to decide whether the Department of Justice must disclose secret grand jury materials from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to the House Judiciary Committee. This guarantees that the materials will not be made available to Congress before the election.

Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog writes, Court will take up dispute over secret materials from Mueller report:

The justices added another high-profile case to their docket for the fall, involving a dispute over efforts by members of Congress to obtain secret materials from the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller submitted a report last year to Attorney General William Barr on possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Barr released a redacted version of that report in April 2019. In July 2019, the House Judiciary Committee went to federal court in Washington, D.C., seeking an order that would require the disclosure of the redacted portions of the Mueller report, as well as grand jury transcripts and materials that had been kept secret, for use in its impeachment investigation. The committee relied on a provision in a federal rule of criminal procedure that allows a court to authorize the disclosure of grand jury materials that would otherwise be kept secret “in connection with a judicial proceeding.”

The district court granted the committee’s request to have access to the parts of the report redacted under grand jury secrecy rules, as well as the related grand jury materials, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld that order. The government went to the Supreme Court in May, asking the justices to block the release of the grand jury materials until it could file its petition for review of the D.C. Circuit’s decision; otherwise, the government contended, it would have to hand the materials over, lifting the veil of secrecy and potentially rendering any future proceedings in the dispute meaningless. On May 20, the justices put the disclosure of the materials on hold, and today they agreed to weigh in. But unless the justices fast-track the oral argument (and there was no indication today that they intend to do so), they are not likely to hear the case until December, after Election Day, with a ruling to follow sometime next year.

In the past, Special Prosecutors Leon Jaworski in the Nixon impeachment and Ken Starr in the Clinton impeachment, under the aegis of the Department of Justice, requested the court to release grand jury testimony and evidence to Congress — a specific exception under Criminal Rules of Procedure, Rule 6(e) — and voluntarily provided that information to Congress.

Attorney General William “Coverup” Barr, in an unprecedented move, refused to be cooperative and forced Congress to pursue this litigation in court.

Based upon prior precedents (ahem, looking at you Justice Roberts), this should have been a no-brainer: cert denied based upon prior precedent, as the District Court and Court of Appeals plainly held. There is no genuine legal dispute here.

But at least four justices (presumably the usual suspects) on the court voted to grant cert, and thus run interference for the Trump administration and William “Coverup” Barr, delaying this case past election day.

This is an unethical politically motivated move to keep the grand jury evidence out of the hands of Congress until after election day, pure and simple.

Note: This may be a harbinger of how the court will rule on the Trump financial documents cases next week. As I have said before, I expect the court to send the cases back to the lower courts with instructions on how to proceed, thus delaying production of any documents until after election day.

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