Trump scores 'big victory' as Supreme Court takes up Mueller appeal

The Supreme Court will take up a case concerning secret grand jury materials from the Mueller report, meaning Democrats will likely not obtain access to them before the 2020 presidential election.

The court on Thursday said it would hear the Trump administration's appeal of a lower court's order to turn over secret materials from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, which examined Russian interference in the 2016 election, to the House of Representatives, The Associated Press reports.

If the Supreme Court had turned down this appeal, Bloomberg notes, the Mueller materials "could have become public before the November election." But since the court will hear the case in its next term beginning in the fall, the Thursday decision, AP writes, "will keep the documents out of congressional hands at least until the case is resolved, which is not likely to happen before 2021." And since a ruling isn't expected to come until after there's a new Congress in January 2021, CNN writes the decision "could effectively kill the effort to get the documents."

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An appeals court previously sided with Democrats and said the House Judiciary Committee should be able to access the secret materials because Mueller's probe "stopped short" of coming to a conclusion about President Trump's conduct, while the Department of Justice says the House hasn't indicated that it "urgently needs these materials for any ongoing impeachment investigation." After several high-profile recent losses for the administration at the Supreme Court recently, Politico's Andrew Desiderio notes this was a "big victory" for Trump.