On Thursday, the Supreme Court stated it will decide whether or not the House of Representatives can access grand jury materials. The Supreme Court will take up the case in the fall.
The materials in question are related to the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller’s investigation, which concluded in 2019, looked into the Donald Trump presidential campaign. The purpose of the investigation was to determine if the campaign had knowingly conspired with Russia to sabotage the election.
In the end, Mueller did not reach a conclusion that exonerated the president. Instead, the special counsel found that he could not rule out the possibility that the campaign conspired with Russian nationals to affect the election.
Officials indicted several Russian nationals on charges of hacking. The hackers had a whole enterprise, password manager information being just the tip of the iceberg. They were also linked to an attempt to hack the Democratic National Convention.
After Mueller passed his investigation to the House, the lower chamber eventually opened impeachment proceedings against the president. However, these were unrelated to Mueller’s report.
The public version of the report had redactions in some areas. Officials held back grand jury materials from public record. These are the materials that the House is seeking in court. The Department of Justice, however, has blocked these attempts numerous times.
The case is notable because usually, the materials of federal investigations are normally a secret. The only exception to this is in cases where the materials are “preliminary to or in connection with a judicial proceeding”.
Lawyers from the House argue that they need to see this material in connection with the impeachment proceedings. The language of the Constitution suggests that an impeachment is a judicial proceeding.
The lawyers argue that this means that Congress should grant them access to grand jury materials.
The Department of Justice has maintained that it’s in the right to keep the materials secret. After all, it’s common practice to keep such materials under wraps. They further argue that the House is overstepping its bounds in classifying the materials as adjacent to a judicial proceeding. In so doing, the DOJ argues, the House is predicating an investigation on what they might find in secret materials.
The DOJ’s filing notes “The ordinary meaning of ‘judicial proceeding’ is a proceeding before a court, not an impeachment trial before elected legislators”. However, this didn’t stop two lower courts from ruling in favor of Congress, against the Department. Courts found the House’s argument, that Congress “tries” the president, and “judgement” is made, to indicate a court proceeding.
