Department of Justice officials are “finally recognizing” the right of Congress to view subpoenaed and unredacted documents regarding the DOJ’s investigation of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Tuesday on Fox News’ “Happening Now.”
House Committee on the Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, announced Monday that they reached a deal with Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd and U.S. Attorney John Lausch of the Northern District of Illinois.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray appointed Lausch to oversee and speed up efforts to deliver the documents lawmakers have been seeking for months. The documents are those regarding the DOJ’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server for official business as secretary of state.
When host Jon Scott asked Issa, a member of the Judiciary Committee, if he felt “confident” that the two committees were “going to be getting everything you’re looking for,” Issa replied, “It remains to be seen.”
“But it’s a refreshing change where the Department of Justice is recognizing our right under a subpoena and our right to unredact [the documents,]” Issa said.
Issa noted that the DOJ “for seven years” under former President Barack Obama’s administration “denied documents even after being held in contempt, thus requiring federal judges to get involved in forcing the DOJ “to get even a semblance of cooperation.”
The Obama administration “withheld documents” from the House committees by using “this same technique of very slow redaction,” Issa lamented.
“They used it in the IRS, in Benghazi, in ‘Fast and Furious,'” Issa said, pointing to some of the Obama administration’s glaring controversies. “So they’re used to doing it in the bureaucracy, and it’s taking Cabinet officers’ intervening and saying, ‘No, Congress has a right. Get to it. This is not just a [Freedom of Information Act request] from some outside group. This is Congress meeting its constitutional responsibility.”
The congressman said that the agreement involves “camera review,” which allows the lawmaker to view the documents “before making a decision about whether we need them.”
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“It’s nice to be able to at least have an agreement where we can sift through some of these documents in an expeditious fashion,” Issa said. “To that extent, I appreciate the attorney general and others weighing in on something the American people have a right to know.”
“Although the framework [of the deal] hasn’t been made public, essentially it’s going to be — get to see the documents, as in get to see the documents — not a few pages after someone has poured over and black-marked over, as we say, redacted, information to where you’re trying to figure out what it really means, and so on,” Issa said.
PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.
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