That Was Then, This Is Now

Back in 1998 when Democrat Bill Clinton was the president and an Independent Prosecutor named Ken Starr had, after a lengthy grand jury investigation, recorded President Clinton's shenanigans in his report, Congressman Jerrold Nadler was adamantly opposed to the report being made public without first being redacted.

It's illegal to release grand jury material, Nadler pointed out, because innocent people, caught up in the investigation, could be deeply harmed by embarrassing testimony and because sensitive national security information could be compromised.

Here's what Mr. Nadler said in 1998 about releasing the special prosecutor's report:

Mr. Starr in his transmittal letter to the speaker and the minority leader made it clear that much of this material is Federal Rule 6(e) material, that is material that by law, unless contravened by a vote of the House, must be kept secret.

It’s grand jury material. It represents statements which may or may not be true by various witnesses, salacious material, all kinds of material that it would be unfair to release.

So, I assume what’s going to have to happen before anything else happens is that somebody — the staff of the Judiciary Committee, perhaps the chairman and ranking minority member — is going to have to go over this material, at least the 400 or 500 pages in the report to determine what is fit for release and what is, as a matter of decency and protecting people’s privacy rights, people who may be totally innocent third parties, what must not be released at all.

Notwithstanding his scruples in 1998, Mr. Nadler today chairs the House Judiciary Committee and he's demanding that special counsel Robert Mueller's full report be released without any redactions regardless of its impact on innocent people and national security:

Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the committee’s chairman, made clear that Democrats are not satisfied with Attorney General William P. Barr’s assurances on Friday that he will produce a full, albeit redacted, copy of the nearly 400-page report to Congress by mid-April.

“As I have made clear, Congress requires the full and complete special counsel report, without redactions, as well as access to the underlying evidence,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement. “The attorney general should reconsider so that we can work together to ensure the maximum transparency of this important report to both Congress and the American people.”

What might have changed Chairman Nadler's mind on releasing unredacted an report the contents of which might humiliate people in ways unrelated to the purpose of Mueller's investigation? I don't know for sure, but here's a possibility: In '98 the president was a Democrat, today he's a Republican.