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Protests planned in Spokane to demand release of full Mueller report on Russian interference

Members of the protest group Herndon Reston Indivisible and Kremlin Annex hold signs saying “Full Report,” outside the White House in Washington on March 25. A protest is planned for Thursday in Spokane to call for a full public release of Robert Mueller’s full report on Russian election interference. (Jacquelyn Martin / AP)
By Kip Hill kiphillreporter@gmail.com

Protesters in Spokane plan to join demonstrations nationwide Thursday to demand public release of the full investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Demonstrators plan to assemble outside the Thomas S. Foley U.S. Courthouse at 5 p.m., after visits to the local offices of Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, said Tom Topping, one of the organizers of the local event.

“It’s really to pressure the attorney general to release it,” Topping said. “It’s just all about no one’s above the law. The people paid for the report, it belongs to the people.”

The lawmakers the demonstrators plan to lobby have agreed with those sentiments. McMorris Rodgers was part of a unanimous vote on the House of Representatives floor last month calling for the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to be released publicly, and Murray has been a vocal supporter of an unredacted release.

A House panel voted Wednesday along party lines to authorize subpoenas for the full report in the wake of perceived foot-dragging by U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who failed Wednesday to release the report by a Congressional deadline.

Barr has said the report needs to be redacted to eliminate information sensitive to national security and to ongoing investigations, but Democratic lawmakers have said, and Topping echoed Wednesday, that the attorney general should not stand in the way of the report’s full release, citing concerns about Barr’s criticism of the special counsel investigation’s reach in an internal memo released publicly in December.

“There’s no reason he can’t release it to the top people in Congress. They have to see the full report. They have to see it immediately,” Topping said.