The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to the Justice Department Thursday night, demanding documents related to the role information from a controversial dossier played in securing a surveillance warrant for a Trump campaign adviser, the investigation into former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, and the firing of Andrew McCabe as deputy FBI director.
In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., complained that the Justice Department has been taking too long to produce the materials, some of which he and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., began asking the department for last October. Gowdy did not join Goodlatte in issuing any of the subpoenas.
Goodlatte’s complaint noted that the department “has only produced a fraction” of the 1.2 million documents it turned over to its own inspector general related to Clinton’s use of a private email server, which Goodlatte and Gowdy requested in October. Goodlatte also noted that DOJ has produced “no documents” in response to his February request for records related to how the FBI and DOJ used information passed to them by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier alleging Trump had links to Russia, whose work was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, to support an application to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser.
Goodlatte said the subpoena also covered documents related to McCabe’s firing because the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility appears to have recommended it partially because of “events related to the investigation surrounding former Secretary Clinton’s private email server,” Goodlatte wrote in the letter.
In a statement, the DOJ stressed that the department was and would continue to work to fulfill his request.
“Since January, more than two dozen FBI staff have been assisting the Department in producing, on a rolling basis, responsive documents to the Committee’s broad request every 10 to 14 days,” a Justice Department spokesman said, noting that “there are approximately 30,000 documents thought to be responsive to the Committee’s inquiry,” 3,000 of which had been delivered. The spokesman said that department staff were reviewing information to make sure it any documents passed to the committee would not reveal classified or confidential information, but that the committee staff were welcome to review unredacted documents at the Justice Department.
(c) 2018, The Washington Post · Karoun Demirjian, Sari Horwitz
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