From Congress to Mueller, Trump’s problems are mounting

[BloombergOpinion]( [Early Returns]( [Jonathan Bernstein]( After a day in which House Democrats demonstrated exactly what President Donald Trump is up against now that at least one chamber of Congress is interested in doing oversight, it emerged that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team isn’t through with him either. Politico [has the first story](. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee prepared to issue a subpoena for Mueller’s full report on his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Over at House Oversight and Reform, Democrats are seeking years of Trump’s financial records. And then Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal finally asked the Internal Revenue Service for Trump’s tax returns. This isn’t harassment. It’s oversight. The truth is that Trump has made close scrutiny of his finances necessary by refusing to rid himself of obvious conflicts of interest, in likely violation of the emoluments clauses in the Constitution. Perhaps none of these conflicts has affected Trump’s decisions while in office. But no modern president has simply demanded that the nation take his word that he’ll ignore his business interests and act with integrity, and it’s hardly surprising that Congress won’t go along with it. (And that’s not even counting the [growing security concerns]( at Trump’s various properties.) As for the Mueller report? A very interesting development came Wednesday night: Stories in both the [New York Times]( and the [Washington Post]( said, as the Times put it, that some members of Mueller’s team “have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated.” There are two ways to interpret these stories. One, which I still think is unlikely, is that the special counsel’s office thinks Barr simply lied about the report. Why is it unlikely? Because the chances of the report becoming public were always high, and lying about it wouldn’t be remotely worth the damage – to Barr or Trump – if it was uncovered. I also suspect that if Barr had badly misinterpreted the report it wouldn’t have taken this long for Mueller’s team to find some reporters. Plus, Barr’s letter was vague enough that it could cover anything from relatively good news for the president – almost a full exoneration on Russia and some modest complaints on obstruction of justice – to a long list of new, ugly revelations on both counts. In other words, the report could be pretty bad without Barr having really lied about it. The more likely reason these two stories appeared when they did is that they were intended as a signal that Mueller and his prosecutors will fight, publicly if necessary, for releasing the report with minimal redactions. That might explain the timing of the pieces, which came out just as Trump’s position has started to evolve from favoring a full public release to, well, not so much. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tim O’Brien said in a smart item before the two stories appeared, the [fight over the Mueller report]( is starting to look very ugly. It was always going to be a tough fight for Trump. The media has a bias in favor of disclosure, U.S. political culture prizes openness, and the president’s argument – that a supposedly vindicating report must remain secret – doesn’t make sense. But now we have reason to think that even if Trump manages to keep the report under wraps, Mueller’s team may be willing to leak some of its findings. We may also conclude that they’ll be watching closely to see if any redactions are improper or misleading. It’s almost as if [Trump wasn’t very smart to have overreached in the first place](. 1. Sarah Bauerle Danzman and Geoffrey Gertz at the Monkey Cage [on U.S. security, China and Grindr](. 2. Anna Law on the academic field of [American Political Development](. 3. Fred Kaplan on [Mar-a-Lago and Trump's approach to security](. 4. Helaine Olen asks [Senator Bernie Sanders to release his tax returns]( already – and goes through which Democrats have done so and which haven’t. Good call. 5. And David Byler on [white working-class Democrats](. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](hash=b9b2681361bede0e1069ca238efb1ec2). Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. Bloomberg L.P. ● 731 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022 [Web]( ● [Facebook]( ● [Twitter]( [Feedback]( ● [Unsubscribe](