The FBI is promising swift action on a House subpoena covering three politically charged investigations after word that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has grown angry with the bureau’s slow-walking of congressional requests for information.
Last week the House Judiciary Committee sent a subpoena to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein demanding documents from the Justice Department and the FBI “regarding charging decisions in the investigation surrounding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server, potential abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommendation to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe,” according to a committee press release.
In a letter accompanying the subpoena, Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., told Rosenstein the committee had asked for the documents months ago and received little or nothing in response. “Given the department’s ongoing delays in producing these documents, I am left with no choice but to issue [a] subpoena to compel production of these documents,” Goodlatte wrote.
Late Tuesday, a source who asked to be identified as a “DOJ insider” emailed an update from inside the Justice Department, making clear Sessions has grown impatient with FBI Director Christopher Wray:
Sure enough, on Tuesday, Wray issued a press release promising to double the number of people working on the document request. From Wray:
Up until today, we have dedicated 27 FBI staff to review the records that are potentially responsive to Chairman Goodlatte’s requests. The actual number of documents responsive to this request is likely in the thousands. Regardless, I agree that the current pace of production is too slow.
Accordingly, I am doubling the number of assigned FBI staff, for a total of 54, to cover two shifts per day from 8 a.m. to midnight to expedite completion of this project.
Wray’s announcement was welcome news to members of the House committee. Welcome — but still cautiously received.
“Obviously that’s a good sign, but I’ll believe it when I see it,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a member of the committee who has been pursuing the issue, said in an interview Tuesday evening. “But as important as getting documents to us in a much more timely fashion is, are they going to be redacted? We know in the past that documents we have received have been redacted so much that we can’t figure them out.”
In recent days Jordan and Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the House Oversight Committee’s subcommittee on government operations, have been sending staff to the Justice Department to view less redacted copies of key documents in the various investigations under review. The presence of those congressional investigators sent a clear message to the Justice Department that the House was not going to give up.
Now, the Justice Department is promising to do better — and the attorney general has signaled that he is not happy with the FBI director’s performance. Now, lawmakers will wait to see what that means.
