WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump asserted executive privilege Wednesday to block release to Congress of the special counsel's unredacted report and its underlying evidence in a escalation of a legal and political clash between House Democrats and the White House.
The White House announced the claim hours before the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena for the material. The 24-16 vote was along party lines.
If the full House approves the resolution, Barr would be the nation's second top lawman to ever face that sanction.
The latest confrontation between the White House and Capitol Hill raised the constitutional stakes substantially and almost certainly is headed to court amid rising fallout from the 22-month investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Mueller's report concluded that the Trump campaign did not illegally conspire with Russia during the 2016 election. It also laid out "substantial evidence" that the president tried to obstruct the investigation but reached no conclusion on whether he had violated the law.
Lawyers for the Justice Department and the special counsel's office redacted about 10% of the 448-page report before its public release, and House Democrats insisted they need to inspect the censored material.
"This is information we are legally entitled to receive and are constitutionally obligated to review," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who chairs the committee.
As the committee hearing began, the Justice Department released a letter saying that Trump was making a preliminary claim of executive privilege.
Although the White House has previously threatened to invoke executive privilege _ most notably when restricting testimony provided by former officials on Capitol Hill _ Wednesday's announcement was Trump's first formal assertion since taking office in 2017 of the legal principle that allows presidents to keep private his conversations and communications with advisers.
Mueller's report relies heavily on interviews with current and former senior staff in the White House, most notably former chief counsel Donald McGahn. The White House had allowed them to speak with the special counsel's office and did not assert executive privilege over the partially redacted version of the report that was released on April 18.
The White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, told reporters that Trump had "no other option" to counter Nadler's "blatant abuse of power." The preliminary step serves as a placeholder, giving the president time to review the materials and consider a more definitive attempt to block congressional access to specific documents.
Experts noted that the contempt resolution and the executive privilege claim were further proof of how quickly relationships had deteriorated between House Democrats and Trump, who has pledged to fight "all the subpoenas."
"Usually you negotiate for months and months," said John Yoo, a University of California, Berkeley law professor who previously worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee and President George W. Bush's Justice Department. "They're immediately going to the walls of their castles, and they are quickly escalating."
In addition to battles involving the Russia investigation, Democrats have accused the Trump administration of stonewalling their probes of the president's taxes and handling of security clearances for several White House aides, including Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
"This is unprecedented," Nadler said Wednesday. "If allowed to go unchecked, this obstruction means the end of congressional oversight."
During the House Judiciary Committee hearing, Democrats repeatedly accused Trump of tearing at the country's constitutional fabric.
"What is the Trump administration hiding from the American people?" said Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif. "Because the administration is not just stonewalling this committee. They're stonewalling every committee's request for information."
Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the committee, said Democrats were seeking more documents because they were unhappy that Mueller didn't find a case for impeaching the president.
"We think we're going to find out something more than he found out?" Collins said. "Come on. We're manufacturing a crisis, and that's why we're here."
Republicans also said Barr was following the law by refusing to turn over the unredacted report, which includes grand jury evidence that is required to be kept under wraps.
They pointed to a Wednesday letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, who told Nadler that Barr "could not comply with your subpoena in its current form without violating the law, court rules, and court orders, and without threatening the independence of the Department of Justice's prosecutorial functions."
Nadler disagreed, saying he wanted to work with Barr to ask a judge for permission to have access to the grand jury material.
A full vote of the House on the contempt resolution could be averted if negotiations between committee staffers and Justice Department officials produce a compromise. But that appeared unlikely after the White House's announcement on executive privilege gave Barr more legal grounds to resist.
House leaders haven't decided how soon the contempt resolution would come to the floor, according to Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md. He accused the Trump administration of participating in "perhaps the greatest coverup of any president in American history."
Hoyer indicated that Democrats are willing to be patient if the contempt proceedings against Barr end up in a lengthy legal battle, which could extend into 2020 and become a presidential campaign issue.
"If it takes a year and a half, that's a relatively short period of time in the course of the history of our country," Hoyer said.
There's precedent for similar court fights to last far longer.
In 2012, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. became the first sitting Cabinet member to be voted in contempt by the Republican-controlled House in a battle over access to Justice Department documents on a failed gun-tracking operation known as "Fast and Furious."
The legal battle lasted for years after Holder left his position.
"We still don't have all the documents," Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., said on Wednesday, a reminder of how such disputes rarely have tidy or timely ends.
