Sessions pushes FBI to comply with Congressional requests on Clinton investigation, other matters
Byron York:
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.There are political as well as substantive reasons for pushing this document production. I suspect the documents will put the Democrats on the defensive about the Clinton investigation. If so, this should benefit Republicans in the midterm elections. The committee also needs to get to the bottom of the FBI's mishandling of that investigation while it still has a majority.
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:Senior staff on both sides of the street have met on this and the FBI is getting called on the carpet. The Attorney General is angry with how slow the process has moved when it comes to requests from Congress to the FBI. He's told Wray that the pace is unacceptable and that if the FBI needs to double the number of people working on this, then that's what they need to do, but he is done seeing the Department criticized for the FBI's slow walking of requests from Congress like the last administration when these requests should be a top priority.Sure enough, on Tuesday, Wray issued a press release promising to double the number of people working on the document request. From Wray:
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