Former Bill Clinton adviser and pollster Mark Penn said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday that our political system is being weaponized against itself and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., is to blame because he is acting like the “supreme power of the nation.”
“I saw Nadler hurling insights like 'dictator' at others when, in fact, he’s saying ‘give me the tax returns, give me investigation, give me the report, including grand jury investigation, I Jerrold Nadler am the supreme power of the nation,’ and he’s not,” Penn said.
“He’s chairman of a congressional committee. It’s a co-equal branch. He has a limited power to subpoena things for good purposes, not for political ends.”
Penn made the comments on “Fox & Friends” hours before President Trump asserted executive privilege in a bid to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s unredacted report and underlying documents from subpoena by the House Judiciary Committee.
The president’s move came after the Justice Department, late Tuesday night, requested that the House Judiciary Committee postpone a scheduled vote on whether to hold Attorney General Bill Barr in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena to provide the Mueller files to the panel. The Justice Department warned that if the committee did not postpone the vote, the attorney general would recommend that Trump claim executive privilege over the materials.
"The Attorney General has been transparent and accommodating throughout this process, including by releasing the no-collusion, no-conspiracy, no-obstruction Mueller Report to the public and offering to testify before the Committee. These attempts to work with the Committee have been flatly rejected. They didn’t like the results of the report, and now they want a redo," press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement on Wednesday.
TRUMP ASSERTS EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE TO BLOCK RELEASE OF FULL, UNREDACTED MUELLER REPORT
"Faced with Chairman Nadler’s blatant abuse of power, and at the Attorney General’s request, the President has no other option than to make a protective assertion of executive privilege,” she continued.
“We have a problem that the Democratic base has been convinced that Nadler and impeachment and Russia collusion is all correct,” Penn said.
“So he’s (Nadler’s) in a very safe district and he gets his moment in the spotlight. He and (California Rep. Adam) Schiff. At the same time, the broad electorate says, give me infrastructure, not investigations.”
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He added, “It’s become a show trial and a spectacle rather than a real investigation. There was a two-year investigation that itself probably shouldn't have happened and it said there was no collusion. Move on for the good of the country and for our democracy.”