House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) knocked Attorney General William Barr for allowing President Donald Trump’s team to view a version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report before its release to the public, but she called on Congress to do just that when former President Bill Clinton was under investigation in 1998.
Just ahead of the Mueller report’s release on Thursday, Pelosi sounded off on Barr in a tweet ripping him for giving the president a “sneak preview” of the report and called for Mueller to testify before Congress on his findings.
AG Barr has confirmed the staggering partisan effort by the Trump Admin to spin public’s view of the #MuellerReport – complete with acknowledgment that the Trump team received a sneak preview. It’s more urgent than ever that Special Counsel Mueller testify before Congress. https://t.co/waoGzLntlt
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) April 18, 2019
NTK Network pointed out, however, that the speaker had a much different feeling on the matter when the results of an investigation into a Democratic president were about to be released.
Back in 1998, Congress was debating legislation to release then-special counsel Ken Starr’s over 400-page report on the probe into Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. At the time, she prompted then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to let the president view the report before the American people could.
“Mr. Speaker, for seven of the eleven years that I have served in Congress, I have served on the Ethics Committee or the ethics task force. It is from that perspective that I have several questions to ask,” she said.
“Mr. Speaker: Why would you not afford the President of the United States the same opportunity you were given by the Ethics Committee of having almost a week’s advance notice to review the charges against you, and so that you could have your response be part of the report?” she added
Watch her old comments below:
Pelosi was referring to an Ethics Committee investigation into Gingrich, which resulted in the speaker getting reprimanded by the House for “claiming tax-exempt status for a college course that was run for political purposes.”
As IJR Red noted, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) also flip-flopped this week when he demanded that the full, unredacted Mueller report be released — a comment that stood in contrast to how he felt about releasing the unredacted Starr report in 1998. On Friday, he subpoenaed the report nonetheless.
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