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The California Report

'Every Word. Every Comma. Every Period.': Bay Area Lawmakers Call for Full Release of Mueller Report

Bay Area legislators want the full report made public, but some legal experts say privacy concerns could make that difficult.
Sonja HutsonMichelle Wiley
04:08
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says Attorney General William Barr's letter to Congress summarizing Robert Mueller's findings 'raises as many questions as it answers.' (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Updated Monday, 7:00 p.m.

Bay Area lawmakers are calling on Attorney General William Barr to make public the full text of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, but legal experts say there could be potential privacy concerns about releasing the full report.

Barr on Sunday sent a four-page letter to Congress summarizing Mueller's report. According to Barr, Mueller found no evidence that President Trump's campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election, and the report did not take a position on whether Trump obstructed justice in the ongoing investigation.

"My goal and intent is to release as much of the Special Counsel's report as I can consistent with applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies," Barr wrote, adding that he intends to work with Mueller's office to identify material in the report that cannot be made public.

The Mueller Report

Bay Area lawmakers are among members of both parties from across the country who are on calling on Barr to release the full report.

Congressman Jared Huffman said the public should see more than a few partial quotes from the report in Barr’s summary.
"We need to know what entirely did Special Counsel Muller say on this subject and I'm not going to just accept this 'no collusion mantra' as the final word," he told KQED.
And, more details should be made public about Russian interference in the 2016 election, Congressman John Garamendi said: "We cannot have that ever happen again.  2020 is just around the corner."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said in a joint statement with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that Barr’s letter raises as many questions as it answers."
"The fact that Special Counsel Mueller’s report does not exonerate the president on a charge as serious as obstruction of justice demonstrates how urgent it is that the full report and underlying documentation be made public without any further delay," the letter said.

But UC Hastings law professor Rory Little said that might not be possible.

"Normally you don't release grand jury material, and you don't release classified information," Little said. "You also don't want to reveal information that exposes an ongoing investigation. And there are still a number of ongoing investigations that we know of, and there may be other ongoing investigations that we don't know of."

According to Loyola Law School professor Jessica Levinson, those objections might not hold up well in court. She said they might if the investigation was about Trump's personal life, "but when you're looking at potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether or not the president obstructed justice, I don't think you have the same type of privacy or privilege concerns."

Levinson added that this is uncharted territory because this is the first special counsel investigation since new rules were written in 1999.

Other lawmakers took to Twitter on Sunday to urge the attorney general to make the full report public.

KQED News' Peter Jon Shuler contributed to this report.

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