House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., led the charge Wednesday to hold Attorney General Bill Barr in contempt of Congress for not handing over documents related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe -- declaring the move necessary as the country enters a "constitutional crisis." But Nadler took a very different stance on contempt back in 2012, when House Republicans took the same step against then-AG Eric Holder for refusing to hand over documents related to the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal, where DOJ officials tracked thousands of guns smuggled across the border but did nothing to stop them. HOUSE PANEL VOTES TO HOLD BARR IN CONTEMPT, AS TRUMP ASSERTS EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE OVER MUELLER FILES “Just joined the #walkout of the House chamber to protest the shameful, politically-motivated GOP vote holding AG [Eric] Holder in contempt,” Nadler tweeted in 2012. He joined more than 100 Democrats in walking out over the vote to hold the Obama-era DOJ leader in contempt. Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., argued House Republicans were more politically motivated in attacking Holder than driven to get to the bottom of the failed operation. “What is happening here is shameful," said Pelosi. After the contempt vote on Wednesday, conservatives pointed to the vintage Nadler tweet as an example of a double standard. “Ahhh the irony. Political hacks gonna hack,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted. “Nadler now says the White House ‘stonewalling’ Congress represents an attack on ‘the essence of our democracy’ – as though stonewalling were some new phenomena,” former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said in an op-ed for Fox News. “Where was Nadler's righteous indignation when the stonewalling came from a Democratic White House?” JASON CHAFFETZ: NADLER CRIES 'CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS' BUT LET'S LOOK AT WHAT DEMS SAID ABOUT FAST AND FURIOUS Nadler's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News. Nadler was also accused of hypocrisy last month by GOP critics for his subpoena of the unredacted Mueller report, with critics pointing to video from the Clinton days showing him urging caution regarding the release of details from then-Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report. “But now a different political landscape compels the chairman to adopt new standards of fairness, ignore existing law and demand the material he once considered ‘unfair to release,’” Committee Ranking Member Doug Collins, R-Ga., said. Nadler maintained he has been consistent in both cases -- calling in 1998 and the present day for the committee to first review the documents, acknowledging in both cases concerns about the release of grand jury materials to the general public. Democrats aren't the only ones switching sides on contempt. Republicans who voted for Holder to be held in contempt in 2012 dismissed the vote this week as the Democrats’ latest effort to drag out the Russia controversy in the wake of the Mueller report. But Republicans argue that the fight over the Fast and the Furious scandal was more substantive. “The fight with Barr is a political stunt,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said this week. “Real oversight was when House sought documents about #FastandFurious an Eric Holder program that allowed guns to reach drug cartels in Mexico." Chaffetz said the Congress should hold fast to its subpoena power, “but they need a winning case (Barr wins this case easily), and a principled backbone of consistency.” CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP “America should not mistake this charade by the Democrats for a principled stand,” he wrote. “Not when the principles shift with the political fortunes of the Democratic Party.” The fight over documents in the 2012 controversy seemed to resolve only this week when a settlement was reached between the House and DOJ. According to Politico, both sides said they maintained their disagreements but were dropping their appeals and the underlying lawsuit. Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report.<doc-sep>Some Democratic lawmakers threaten to handcuff and lock up Attorney General William Barr, but holding someone in contempt of Congress rarely is more than a censure vote. The most relevant comparison: In a bipartisan vote, 17 House Democrats joined the Republican majority in 2012 to hold then-Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress for not providing thousands of pages of documents regarding Operation Fast and Furious, a serious scandal for the Obama administration. More Democrats, a total of 21, joined Republicans to find Holder in civil contempt. Two Republicans voted against the criminal contempt citation. Fast and Furious, a Justice Department program, allowed hundreds of American guns to flow to Mexican drug trafficking organizations. However, the Justice Department lost track of the guns. In late 2010, one was found at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder. The House at the time was under Republican control, and the criminal and civil contempt citations originated in the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, under Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif. Democrats now control the House, and one of Barr’s harshest critics is Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y. Democratic lawmakers gave Barr a deadline of Monday to provide a completely unredacted copy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign and potential ties to President Donald Trump. Barr responded that he has provided as much of the report as he is allowed to provide by law because it contains grand jury information and material that potentially could jeopardize an ongoing investigation. By contrast, the contempt vote on Holder was legitimate, said Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department lawyer and co-author with journalist John Fund of the 2014 book “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.” “Here, [Barr] has given Congress complete access to the report except for some parts,” von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “Holder refused to provide information on Fast and Furious.” “He was trying to cover up the most reckless Department of Justice ever, which led to the death of a Border Patrol agent,” von Spakovsky said of Holder. “The improper thing in the Barr case is that they want to hold him in contempt for following federal law.” Von Spakovsky said he doubts a contempt citation for Barr would have the same bipartisan backing that the Holder citation drew. The unredacted Mueller report already is available in a secure room for members of Congress to view, but not to remove or take notes or photographs. The Daily Signal sought comment from Holder by phone and email at the law firm of Covington and Burling, where he is a partner, and the National Democratic Redistricting Commission, where he is chairman. Neither organization had responded as of publication time. After the House voted to find Holder in contempt of Congress, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, Holder’s No. 2, issued a letter to the House stating: “The department will not bring the congressional contempt citation before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute the Attorney General.” Several Democrats indicate it would be different this time, and talk about putting Barr behind bars inside the Capitol. “You have to have him sit for a hearing and you have to have him locked up until he agrees to participate and come to the hearing,” Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “It shows we want to hold him in contempt, but the fact is, he won’t be held in contempt because the Justice Department is not going to enforce a contempt citation against their boss.” The move is a partisan attempt to discredit Barr, who intends to investigate whether the FBI acted properly in moving to surveil a Trump aide during the 2016 campaign, said J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department lawyer and author of “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” “The reason they are doing this [threatening contempt] is because Barr is turning his attention to the real misconduct that occurred, namely using the U.S. government’s intelligence apparatus to target an opposition presidential campaign,” Adams, now president of an election integrity group called the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told The Daily Signal. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., talked about handcuffs and jail for Barr on MSNBC, but got a skeptical response from liberal host Chris Matthews. “Subpoenas are going to fly now, and when they are not complied with, we have what’s called inherent contempt proceedings, which means we send the sergeant [-at-] arms out to handcuff the individual who is declining to testify,” Speier said. Matthews asked: “Who are you going to handcuff?” Speier answered: “I’m going to start with Mr. Barr and bring him in.” “Once there are specific subpoenas, and he does not comply with them,” the California Democrat later added, “he can be brought before the House. He can be tried. He can either be held there to testify, or he can be punished. And there is actually a jail in the Capitol, which has been used as recently as 1930.” Although that’s going back almost a century, Cohen and Speier are legally correct about the authority of Congress. In the 1821 case of Anderson v. Dunn, the Supreme Court held that Congress has the right to enforce contempt citations if the executive branch will not. Otherwise, the high court ruled, the legislative branch would be “exposed to every indignity and interruption that rudeness, caprice, or even conspiracy, may meditate against it.” In 1927, the Senate sent the sergeant-at-arms to Ohio to arrest and detain former Attorney General Harry Daugherty’s brother Mally Daugherty in a probe that stemmed from the Teapot Dome scandal. The Supreme Court upheld the action on the part of Congress. However, Congress no longer has its own jail; Capitol Police, however, maintain a holding cell. Congress held administration officials in contempt of Congress in several other cases, but none resulted in incarceration. After IRS official Lois Lerner refused to cooperate with the House’s investigation of the agency’s alleged targeting of tea party groups in 2013, the House voted to hold her in contempt of Congress. The Obama administration’s Justice Department declined to prosecute. When President George W. Bush, a Republican, was in office, the Democrat-controlled House voted in 2007 to hold White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress for not providing information on the president’s firing of U.S. attorneys. During Republican Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the Democrat-controlled House voted to hold Anne Gorsuch, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, in contempt for failing to provide information about a hazardous waste clean-up site. Gorsuch was the first Cabinet-level administration official to face a contempt citation, according to The New York Times. Reagan’s EPA chief is the mother of Neil Gorsuch, now a justice on the Supreme Court.<doc-sep>Tensions between the legislative and executive branch have been simmering for weeks, but they reached a boiling point Wednesday. House Democrats on the Judiciary Committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for failing to provide the full version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the White House responded by invoking executive privilege over it. The immediate consequences will be mostly symbolic. About 10 percent of the Mueller report was redacted, at times clearly because it involved information relevant to the upcoming trial of longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone. The next step in the proceedings will be a vote on the House floor. Although it will likely pass since Democrats control the chamber, Barr will probably face few legal repercussions, as federal prosecutors are unlikely to pursue criminal penalties for a contempt of Congress charge against their own boss. But the speed with which Democrats took the nearly unprecedented measure — it is only the second time in U.S. history that the nation’s top law enforcement officer was held in contempt of Congress — and the surrounding cloud of suspicion and counter-charges reflected the unprecedented scope of conflict between the executive and legislative branches. In the 48 hours since the Judiciary Committee announced it would hold contempt proceedings on Monday, the Trump Administration issued a flurry of rejections for congressional requests, adding to an already deep pile. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced he would not turn over the President’s tax returns to the Ways and Means Committee; on Tuesday, the White House told former White House Counsel Don McGahn not to comply with a subpoena from the judiciary committee; and on Wednesday, after a day of futile negotiations between the committee and the Department of Justice, it invoked executive privilege over the redacted portions of the Mueller report. Democrats unsurprisingly used the high-profile proceedings on contempt to highlight what Nadler is deeming a constitutional crisis. As the markup stretched into the afternoon, the sentiments became less about Barr’s actions and more about about preserving the powers of the legislative branch. “This is unprecedented,” Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler said in his opening statement after listing all the other ways the White House has stonewalled Congress. “If allowed to go unchecked, this obstruction means the end of congressional oversight. As a co-equal branch of government, we should not and cannot allow this to continue.” Every member of the committee was allotted a brief time to speak, and the tenor reflected the partisan tensions. Democrats’ comments largely echoed Nadler’s about the state of U.S. democracy. Republicans, by comparison, defended Barr, arguing that Democrats were on a “witch hunt,” and wanted Barr to break the law by handing over the un-redacted report. Several also pointed out Democrats moved much more quickly to hold Barr in contempt than Republicans on the oversight committee did with his Democratic predecessor Eric Holder in 2012 when they were seeking documents in the Fast and Furious case. “[Democrats] have moved from request to contempt vote in only 43 days, and yet the Justice Department is still at the negotiating table — waiting for Democrats to arrive in good faith,” said ranking member Doug Collins, adding that Democrats want to “sully Bill Barr’s good name and reputation.” Department of Justice spokesperson Kerri Kupec released a statement after the vote, calling it “politically motivated,” and “unnecessary.” “It is deeply disappointing that elected representatives of the American people have chosen to engage in such inappropriate political theatrics,” she said. There is undoubtedly some irony that Barr is the first administration official facing contempt proceedings when his department, unlike the White House counsel’s office, actually came to the table to negotiate. And it is also true that the vote to hold Holder in contempt was, like Barr, upheld along party lines. But veterans of Congressional oversight say that, more than anything, it is this partisanship that is the problem. Tom Davis, a former Republican Congressman who previously chaired the oversight committee, said the increased polarization of Congress dates back to the Bush era, and is contributing to the ability of the executive branch to tighten its grip on oversight. “Congress doesn’t operate as an independent branch,” he said. “The President’s party is an appendage of the executive branch … it was not designed to work this way.” In an ideal world, said Davis, Republicans “would be standing behind the institution” — although he noted that Democrats did the exact same thing under Obama. “No one’s wearing a white hat here,” he said. There have been some instances of bipartisan cooperation in the House since the Democrats retook the gavel. Rep. Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has joined with ranking member Devin Nunes to request all materials from Mueller’s report. The two have twice sent joint letters to the Department of Justice, and, according to a committee aide, are prepared to start the subpoena process because there has been no compliance. But veterans of past fights between Congress and the executive branch don’t seem to hold out any hope that bipartisan cooperation from Congress will compel the Administration to cooperate. “It’s not not so much Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other,” said Kerry Kircher, who was House counsel for the Republican majority during the Obama Administration. “It’s that it is much more of a ‘you are getting nothing approach’ of responding to congressional oversight, as opposed to ‘you’re [going to] get something but we don’t think you should have more than what we’ve given you. '” Kircher said this level of resistance is very different from what he worked with during the Obama Administration. “Nobody [in the executive branch] likes [congressional oversight]. But heretofore everybody recognized it had its place,” he explained. “You mostly argued about degrees. It feels now we’re not arguing about degrees anymore. We’re arguing all or nothing … and that’s a significant escalation.” Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check the box if you do not wish to receive promotional offers via email from TIME. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Alana Abramson at Alana.Abramson@time.com.<doc-sep>
House Judiciary Committee Democrats voted Wednesday to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress, citing a refusal by the Trump administration — which has asserted executive privilege — to provide lawmakers with an unredacted copy of special counsel Robert Mueller's report. But what does holding someone in contempt of Congress mean? Here are the answers to five key questions about the concept. 1. What is contempt of Congress? Congress can vote to hold a person "in contempt" if that person refuses to testify, won't provide information requested by the House or the Senate, or obstructs an inquiry by a congressional committee. Congress' power to hold someone in contempt may be used to "coerce compliance" with its demands, punish a person or remove an obstruction to the inquiry or proceeding, according to the Congressional Research Service. The authority is not specifically laid out in the Constitution, but it is considered an implied power of Congress, according to the CRS. Congress can pursue a criminal or a civil contempt citation. Under a rarely used doctrine known as "inherent contempt," the House or the Senate could send members of its security force — the sergeant at arms — to arrest and detain the witness. This power, however, hasn't been used since 1934, when William MacCracken, a former member of President Herbert Hoover's administration, was arrested and held under a warrant after he declined to appear before the Senate. According to The Washington Post, the Senate sergeant at arms did not have a place to hold MacCracken, who was later put up at a nearby hotel. 2. Who has been held in contempt? When Republicans controlled the House in 2012, they voted to hold President Barack Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, in contempt over the administration's refusal to turn over documents related to the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal. The Obama Justice Department would not prosecute Holder, resulting in a protracted legal battle; it wasn't until January 2016 that a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to produce some documents. The Obama administration appealed, and the case lingered until President Donald Trump took office. Whilethe Trump Justice Department agreed to release some records in March 2018, the litigation was finally resolved only Wednesday after both sides ended a dispute over some of the judge's decisions. In 2008, a Democrat-controlled House voted to hold President George W. Bush's former White House counsel Harriet Miers and chief of staff Josh Bolten in contempt after the White House, citing executive privilege, directed them not to comply with subpoenas for documents related to a congressional investigation into the firing of several U.S. attorneys. The speaker of the House asked the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., to pursue the matter, but the federal prosecutor declined, citing a Justice Department policy of not prosecuting a White House official for criminal contempt of Congress if that official had invoked executive privilege at the behest of the president. Congress sued, and a district court judge sided with lawmakers. The Bush administration appealed, and while the case was still pending, Obama took office. The new administration then settled the case, granting Congress access to some of the documents it sought and allowing sworn testimony from Miers. By then, a year and a half after Congress issued the subpoena, the oversight issue largely was moot. Other Cabinet-level or senior executive branch officials cited for contempt in recent history include Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Commerce Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton in 1975; Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph A. Califano Jr. in 1978; Energy Secretary Charles Duncan in 1980; Energy Secretary James B. Edwards in 1981; Interior Secretary James Watt in 1982; Anne Gorsuch Burford (Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's mother) and Attorney General William French Smith in 1983; White House Counsel John M. Quinn in 1996; and Attorney General Janet Reno in 1998. 3. How does it happen? After members of the House Judiciary Committee concluded their markup discussion over the resolution to hold Barr in contempt Wednesday, the panel voted on the resolution. The resolution now could go to a vote in the full House. Only a simple majority is needed to advance the contempt resolution, and only one chamber needs to approve the measure for a person to be prosecuted for contempt. With a criminal contempt citation, the House would refer the citation to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, which can seek an indictment from a grand jury.