Rep. Mark Meadows, a top conservative from North Carolina, said Saturday there is a “growing consensus” among his colleagues to use the contempt of Congress statute amid frustration with the Justice Department’s failure to comply with a subpoena and hand over 1.2 million documents related to three investigations.
“But it’s not enough to stop there,” the Republican added during an interview on Fox News hours after President Trump vented about the matter on Twitter, accusing his Justice Department of “slow walking” after missing the deadline on Thursday.
House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., sent the subpoena to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein more than two weeks ago, after the agency failed to respond to a request for the documents from Goodlatte and House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., issued four months earlier. The documents they seek relate to the agency’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server, potential abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the firing of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe last month.
“Here are the next two things you have to do,” Meadows told Fox News’s Judge Jeanine Pirro. “We have given a short deadline. I’ve given a deadline of this week. We need to see the documents.”
He claimed the “easiest thing for them to do” now is for Rosenstein to call DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz “who has the documents and say just give them to Congress.”
If Rosenstein fails to take action to allow Congress to “have our constitutional oversight authority supported, then we’ll find someone who can,” Meadows said.
He went on to suggest that impeachment is a possibility.
A Republican House Judiciary Committee aide told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that they were working with the DOJ to take “immediate steps to comply with the subpoena and produce documents to the Committee.”
