2020 Democrats react to Mueller report handover, urge Attorney General William Barr to make it public
Democratic candidates running to unseat President Donald Trump in 2020 reacted quickly to the news Friday that special counsel Robert Mueller had delivered his highly anticipated report to the Department of Justice.
Their one consistent message: Make it public.
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Cory Booker, D-N.J., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke, all called for the report -- the product of nearly two years of investigation -- to be released immediately to the American people.
"The Mueller report must be made public. All of it," Gillibrand said at her 2020 campaign kickoff event in front of Trump International Hotel in New York. "It's not often that I agree with Richard Nixon. But he was right to say that the American people have a right to know whether their president is a crook."
"This report should be made public immediately," Booker tweeted from his campaign account. A longer reaction from Booker was tweeted from his official Senate account: "I am demanding the Mueller report be made immediately available for members of Congress and for the public. Anything short of full transparency will be detrimental to our country moving forward. The American people deserve the truth."
Sanders tweeted, "As Donald Trump said, “Let it come out." I call on the Trump administration to make Special Counsel Mueller's full report public as soon as possible. No one, including the president, is above the law."
"Americans deserve to know the truth now that the Mueller report is complete. The report must be released immediately and AG Barr must publicly testify under oath about the investigation's findings. We need total transparency here," Harris tweeted.
"Attorney General Barr must release the full report to the public," Klobuchar tweeted. "The American people deserve to know the facts."
Warren tweeted, "Attorney General Barr—release the Mueller report to the American public. Now."
"Release the Mueller report to the American people," O'Rourke tweeted.
Other 2020 Democratic hopefuls who joined the chorus of calls for the report to be made public included former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
“The American public deserves to know the contents of the Mueller Report. Donald Trump and his Attorney General cannot be trusted to summarize or excerpt it accurately,” Inslee tweeted.
"The American people deserve to know the full truth about Russia’s interference in our democracy," Castro wrote in a tweet. "The Special Counsel report must be publicly released in its entirety."
"The patriotic action for the Attorney General is to release the entire Mueller Report to the American people. We paid for it and this moment requires transparency," Delaney said in a tweet.
“Make the full Mueller report public and available to the American people,” Gabbard tweeted.
The delivery of the report signaled the completion of Mueller's investigation into how far the Kremlin went to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, including whether anyone with the Trump campaign may have helped those efforts.
The Mueller investigation has been looming over the White House for almost two years of Trump's presidency. As he mounts his re-election bid, the Democratic field appeared to show caution about attacking the president but were united in their calls for transparency. A spokesperson for former Vice President Joe Biden declined to comment on the news.
The first potential Republican primary challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, said the process should play out "without interference."
"It's about Rule of Law. Important for this process to play out without interference," Weld said in a tweet.
