Democrats to Trump: Get ready for a world of hurt after we see the Mueller report

It’s not over. That’s the message from congressional Democrats this week as they urge members to sit tight and wait to see the full Mueller report on Trump-Russia collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 election. But Sen. Lindsey Graham is warning it’s not over for Republicans, either.

Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of the nearly two-year investigation dropped like a bomb on Congressional Democrats Sunday just as they were preparing witness lists for their own investigations.

Now six Democratic committee chairs have given Barr until next Tuesday to produce the report in its entirety — including the underlying evidence— and the House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill demanding to see the details of the DOJ’s obstruction of justice inquiry into Trump.

Democrats are warning that this isn’t a “case closed” moment for Trump. Far from it: Congress has a much broader investigative mandate than Mueller was given, and that will include whether Trump committed obstruction during the probe, and a great many things outside its scope.

“We have to wait to see the whole report to see if there are holes in it,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday. “The theory is that we’ll look at the Mueller report and see if there are gaps in it, and obviously we don’t want to duplicate work that Mueller did – and he did a lot of work.”

Freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) is circulating a letter among her fellow Democrats that calls for the House Judiciary Committee to explicitly investigate whether Trump violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits sitting presidents from profiting off foreign governments; “defrauded” the United States by making allegedly illegal payments to Stormy Daniels; or obstructed justice during the Russia probe.

“The most dangerous threat to our democracy is President Trump’s actions since taking the oath of office,” reads the letter sent to VICE News by her staff. “The fact that President Trump has yet to comply with various clauses of our U.S. Constitution sets a dangerous precedent.”

While Democratic leaders are trying desperately to keep the word “impeachment” out of the conversation, that's proving a challenge among high-profile freshman Democrats.

“We're taking a look at it,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told reporters upon leaving a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning. “I think what's tough is, impeachment in principle is something that I openly support, but it's also just the reality of having the votes in the Senate to pursue that. And so that's something that we have to take into consideration.”

Democratic leaders are walking a tightrope, trying not to alienate the party’s energized progressive base while courting voters in the middle and expanding on their 2018 midterm gains.

“We have been in a place for a long time where we said impeachment was a distraction, and we are not pursuing impeachment,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters at the Capitol.

On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are mostly unified in using Barr’s flimsy summation of the Mueller report to double down on their goal of re-litigating Hillary Clinton.

That’s why Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is already planning to hold hearings on the FBI and the Department of Justice – the entities that many in the GOP believe are behind the Mueller investigation in the first place.

“The people in charge of the investigation clearly were in the tank for her,” Graham told VICE News while walking alongside the train that runs underneath the Capitol.

Graham says he wants to hear from Barr but he also wants his powerful committee to investigate why those agencies never alerted then-candidate and now-president Donald Trump that they believed his campaign staff was compromised.

“To set a counterintelligence investigation against a presidential campaign is a big deal. What are the rules? Are there any rules? What led to the investigation and why didn’t you brief Trump?” Graham told VICE News. “The goal of a counterintelligence investigation is to protect the entity that’s being targeted, and I just don’t know why they didn’t do that with the Trump campaign.”

That’s laughable to Democrats who see Graham’s plan for his committee as yet another GOP ruse to deflect, dodge and change the subject.

“All along, the GOP strategy has been: Ignore the evidence and investigate the investigators. This is just a continuation of that, as well as an attempt to do the president’s bidding,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, told VICE News. “I’m sure this is designed to accommodate the president’s desires.”

That’s why Democratic leaders are still planning to vigorously investigate Trump and his administration, even if they don’t want to use the terms “impeachment” or “collusion.” The chair of the House Oversight Committee told VICE News that the Mueller and Barr releases haven’t impacted his committee’s agenda.

“No, not at all – same thing,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said just off the House floor. “I just want the public to know what Trump is doing.”

Cover image: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media after he arrived at a Senate Republican weekly policy luncheon at the U.S. Capitol March 26, 2019 in Washington, DC. Congressional top Democrats have demanded Attorney General William Barr to release special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation report for the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)