it s also important for them to get it. it can be documents and other materials, connection pursuant to grand jury subpoenas, without having seen that and been behind veil of all of those redacted comments, we don t know how valuable that is, but congress is entitled to find out, and i expect that a court will order this on an expedited basis. do you think there s grand jury material that could change anything fundamental? i mean, i was sitting in the back of that mueller hearing room on wednesday and one of the reasons that i think so many people said, well is that it, is that all was that everyone basically stuck to their points. we saw some democrats at the top of the show move to impeachment. we had a lot of democrats who were for impeaching in president, including mr. nadler. you had republicans who were critical.
democratic congress members backing an impeachment probe has grown as the chairman who would lead, jerry nadler is formally invoking the i word in a count. five house democrats have stepped out in favor of an impeachment inquiry, including congresswoman katherine clark of massachusetts, a member of the house leadership, and the highest ranking democrat to publicly take this stance. then you have three more house democrats today announcing support for an impeachment inquiry. annie custer, chris pompous of new hampshire, and mike eleven of california. you take that together and now you have about a hundred democrats backing some kind of impeachment probe. that is the raw tally. the political nose counting context of this, and for the house democrats, though, that s not all because there is a new legal move as they try to pry more evidence loose from the white house and justice department taking their case to court to get redacted grand jury material. this is the stuff that actually infor
chairman paul manafort share this prize internal polling data with the russian operative, and perhaps why, because you see there, we know what was alluded to. it is redacted. the reason it was redacted is because of grand jury material. now, in the court filing today, the house judiciary committee argues there are several episodes that have this kind of information redacted and the committee needs it. they need it because the doj will not allow prosecution of a sitting president and they explained the house is the only institution of the federal government that can now hold president trump accountable for these actions. they also point to the planned questioning of former white house counselling don mcgahn, the star witness of the mueller report cited over 150 times. house judiciary making the case if there is grand jury testimony of the president s knowledge of these events and how his campaign approached all of it, that would shed light on what the president might have been trying to
context of this, and for the house democrats, though, that s not all because there is a new legal move as they try to pry more evidence loose from the white house and justice department taking their case to court to get redacted grand jury material. this is the stuff that actually informed the grist of the narratives until the mueller report, and it picks up the fight over the very ways that attorney general barr held back parts of this report. we all remember the redactions and he did allow members of congress to see behind some of these redacted pages, so members of congress have already seen more than, say, average citizens, but mr. barr never let anyone see the grand jury information. and while this material is generally restricted from the public, it s not always restricted from these members of congress. you can think about recent history, republicans welcomed it, that same kind of grand jury material when ken starr handed over not only a report but all of his grand jury material
different situation where the prosecutor wanted to give them everything except the stuff they wanted to redact, and they have no particular the justice department has no particular interest in turning over the sealed grand jury material in here, and so i don t think you would have in this situation the justice department would really resist the production of that material, i think, in all likelihood that the committee is asking for. on the other hand, as you point out, there are some real similarities here and one of them got more similar today when the house judiciary committee and the house leadership said hey, i know we haven t called this an impeachment inquiry, but it kind of is an impeachment investigation and that actually has legal significance because the reason the dc circuit court of appeals allowed that transmission in 1974 was that