That feud between GOP investigators and the Justice Department over documents has reached yet another boiling point, with Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte threatening Sunday to issue a new subpoena in the coming days.
This move is motivated, in part, by frustration in Congress that memos written by fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe remain out of the hands of lawmakers while information from these notes gets leaked to the media.
Goodlatte, R-Va., expressed concern about a “lack of production for some documents,” during an appearance on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo, while also acknowledging that there has been a good deal of cooperation as Congress has been given access to a million documents related to decision-making during the 2016 campaign.
But there remain “key documents” that have eluded lawmakers, Goodlatte said, including the “so-called McCabe memos,” which were cited in a New York Times report Friday that said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein talked about secretly recording Trump and invoking the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to oust the president after Comey was fired in May 2017. Rosenstein has denied considering such actions, and follow-up reports said he was being sarcastic or joking about the wire.
Still, Goodlatte said these memos “could very directly bear upon this question of what was Rod Rosenstein doing in that meeting immediately prior to the appointment of Robert Mueller as the special counsel” as well as confirm whether the Times report is true.
“I think that can be — a lot of light can be shed on that if documents we’ve been requesting for quite some time are made public. As a result of that, this week, if they are not produced by tomorrow or Tuesday this week we are going to issue a subpoena to the Justice Department that expands upon the subpoena we issued earlier this year,” Goodlatte continued, referring to a subpoena in March related to the Hillary Clinton emails investigation, potential abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommendation to fire McCabe.
The DOJ inspector general referred McCabe to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., his counsel confirmed in April. The criminal referral was based on findings in a report that McCabe “lacked candor” on four separate occasions. Three of those times were while McCabe was under oath.
It is unclear who leaked information to the memos to the press. McCabe’s legal team denies being behind the leak. They said the memos were given to special counsel Robert Mueller and a copy was left at the FBI at the time of his departure from the bureau earlier this year.
Goodlatte isn’t alone in his frustration on the matter. “If you really want to see them, don’t run for Congress, go be a reporter, because they have seen them and we have not,” House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., quipped on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Other documents Goodlatte hopes to get include former FBI agent Peter Stzrok’s personnel file and some of the text messages Strzok exchanged with ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Many of those text messages between the pair, who were having an extramarital affair, displayed a bias agianst President Trump. Goodlatte also mentioned his desire to see documents on Bruce Ohr, a Justice Department official who had knowledge of the Russia investigation and fed the FBI information from Trump dossier author Christopher Steele.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the subpoena threat.
Goodlatte said some of these documents might be mixed up in the declassification order that Trump made, but later walked back, last week. “Whether they are or not, Congress is entitled to see them unredacted, and they are entitled to see them right now,” Goodlatte said. “It’s especially important to see them know that the new crisis has risen in the conduct of Mr. Rosenstein. But most importantly, we want to get to the bottom of how this investigation was launched in the first place in the first half of 2016 during the presidential election.”
These Russia-related documents that Trump is now leaving up to the DOJ inspector general to parse through as part of its investigation into the agency’s conduct in the Russia investigation have revealed a fissure among leading Republicans in Congress. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said Sunday on Fox News that Trump should respond to the Rosenstein report by immediately declassifying the documents. Meanwhile, Gowdy said on CBS that Trump “has taken a reasonable approach, which is giving [FBI Director] Chris Wray and [Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats a chance to come in and advocate why it should not be released.”
Nunes, Goodlatte, and other conservative lawmakers have repeatedly accused the DOJ of slow-walking their myriad document requests.
Democrats have said the push to declassify the Russia-related documents would endanger national security by revealing sources and methods the intelligence community uses to attain information, a concern echoed by top federal intelligence and law enforcement officials, and accused Republicans of trying to taint the Mueller investigation.
