Senate Democratic leader seeks to protect Special Counsel Mueller, not DACA immigrants
By
Patrick Martin
29 January 2018
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said Sunday that the Democrats would seek to introduce a provision to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who heads the Justice Department’s Russia investigation, to the budget resolution that is under consideration by Congress.
“The most important thing Congress can do right now is to ensure that Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation continues uninterrupted and unimpeded,” he said in a statement issued by his Senate office. “No one—whether it be administration officials, Republicans or the president himself—should get in the way and undermine the investigation, and so Democrats will seek to add protections for Mueller in the ongoing budget negotiations.”
Schumer was responding to press reports claiming that President Donald Trump had decided to fire Mueller last June and was dissuaded from the action only when his White House counsel, Don McGahn, threatened to resign rather than transmit the order to the Justice Department.
Schumer, the most powerful congressional Democrat, made his statement only six days after he agreed to drop any reference to protecting young immigrants from the same budget resolution, capitulating to the White House and congressional Republicans in the standoff that produced a two-day partial shutdown of the federal government.
Under terms of the deal Schumer struck with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Democrats agreed to abandon their filibuster and permit a short-term budget resolution to pass Congress, ending the shutdown and authorizing federal spending through February 8.
This was in return for a promise by McConnell to permit a vote on a stand-alone…