DOJ Draws a Line
Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) not only chairs the House Judiciary Committee in the new Congress, he’s also running the newly created United States House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The name is both too long and a classic example of the type of projection the Trump faction of the Republican Party is prone to. It’s projection in the same vein that Trump perfected. You could be certain that if he accused someone of, say, lying, or of using their connection to the U.S. government to conduct financially beneficial foreign transactions, that he was, in fact, doing it himself. In that same way, the reference in the name of the subcommittee to weaponizing the federal government reflects precisely what people like Jordan tried to do while Trump was in office and when he tried to hold onto power after losing the election.
So here we are with the 118th Congress.
Before we get started tonight, we really should try to come up with a more accurate moniker for the subcommittee. Since Civil Discourse readers are a creative bunch, I’m hoping you’ll come up with a shorter—and more fitting—name. Drop your ideas in the comments.
Right out of the gate, and really even before the new Congress was sworn in, Jordan made it clear he wanted to engage in oversight of DOJ. And good on him. That is, after all, an important part of the Judiciary Committee’s remit. But its job doesn’t involve interfering with investigations that DOJ is conducting. Jordan doesn’t have jurisdiction to use his chairmanship to circumvent justice. Unfortunately, that’s what he appears to be intent on doing.
Earlier this week, the Justice Department sent Jordan a strongly worded letter explaining what kinds of information the committee could—and should not—expect to receive from DOJ in response to its requests. The limitation is a common-sense one that conforms to long-standing DOJ policy.
In essence, the message was: We’ll share as much as we can, especially about our processes, but we’ll defer to prosecutors handling specific cases to determine what information about them can and can’t be shared. In other words, DOJ will tell Jordan’s committee all it wants to know about its processes—how it collects evidence, conducts investigations, and makes prosecutive decisions. But the department drew the line at providing Jordan with information that could damage cases that are currently in progress. And the people who would make the call about what will be shared with Congress won’t be the Biden political appointees; it will be the prosecutors doing the work. They are the people in the best position to determine what can be turned over without damaging their investigation.
To be blunt, DOJ won’t share the type of information with Congress that would screw up a prosecution.
When you think about it, no responsible member of Congress would want to do that. Historically, even in fraught matters, people mostly understand that common-sense limitation. Compromises are worked out regarding what information will be turned over and when. “When” can be the most important issue, because in situations where an ongoing investigation is involved, sometimes a delay is necessary while a matter is resolved. But once key decisions are made—for instance, here, once a special counsel concludes his work and reports to the Attorney General—information can be turned over. So Congress can get information it wants to use to conduct its work; it’s just a question of when.
All of that seems to be lost on Jordan, who is actually a lawyer. He received his degree from Capital University Law School, although in an interview with NPR involving the Mueller investigation, he said he’d never taken the bar exam:
DAVID GREENE: But Congressman, you went to law school, right?
JORDAN: I did.
GREENE: I mean, if you...
JORDAN: Never took the bar exam, so don’t, like—I’m not—I’m just a wannabe. But...
But now Jordan, self-confessed wannabe lawyer, chairs the House Judiciary Committee, and instead of understanding the delicate balance between doing his job and upending DOJ’s work, he’s charging straight in, demanding details of the special counsel’s investigation into classified material found in Joe Biden’s possession, for instance.
“We are conducting oversight of the Justice Department’s actions with respect to former Vice President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, including the apparently unauthorized possession of classified material at a Washington, D.C., private office and in the garage of his Wilmington, Delaware, residence,” Jordan, along with Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“On January 12, 2023, you appointed Robert Hur as Special Counsel to investigate these matters,” they wrote. “The circumstances of this appointment raise fundamental oversight questions that the Committee routinely examines. We expect your complete cooperation with our inquiry.”
What do they want? Republicans want to see the classified materials that are the subject of the special counsel’s investigation. They may argue that they are entitled to see classified information and that they have seen it in other matters, including investigations into leaks. But the difference here, to be clear, is that the classified information itself is the central evidence that’s being evaluated by prosecutors. It’s like asking prosecutors to turn over the evidence while they’re still deciding whether to bring charges.
In the long term, this won’t be a dispute about whether the committee can see classified information. With proper protections in place, they can. This is about whether they can upset the applecart while prosecutors are trying to figure out what direction to steer it.
The letter DOJ sent to Jordan earlier this week seeks to clarify this. It makes it clear the department will provide as much information as it can, while respecting its responsibilities.
Congress isn’t charged with re-conducting or even overseeing the special counsel’s inquiry. Their role is to consider broader policy questions, and they don’t need to see specific documents to answer them. What they need is what DOJ has offered—process responses about how the department handles things, how it handles reviews with the intelligence community and so on. It does not need to get into the facts of specific cases.
DOJ’s line in the sand is that it will cooperate with Congress but it will not compromise the integrity of its investigations.
It’s important for us to review this at length, as we have tonight, because it’s going to become a shouting match in which Republicans will again try to cast aspersions on DOJ’s, and by extension the White House’s, integrity. They’ll equate non-compliance with unreasonable and dangerous requests with criminality.
We should make no mistake about why they’re doing this. It has nothing to do with wanting to reform the system the government uses for classifying documents. The playbook is straight out of the Benghazi hearings, where the current Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, gave up the goods, clarifying on national television what the Republican goals for those hearings were. He bragged to Fox News’s Sean Hannity that “everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
Quiet part. Out loud.
The Benghazi hearings were motivated by politics, not honest legislative concerns. It’s increasingly clear that we’re about to live through a repeat of that hyper-politicized process. The Judiciary Committee isn’t the only group in the House that wants to investigate the Biden administration. Oversight chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) made the mission clear.
If you feel like Alice in Wonderland, you’ve grasped the situation. It’s about sticking it to the Democrats, in a baseless way, untethered to actual facts. So it’s incumbent upon us to understand how this is supposed to work and the process that DOJ is trying to stand up for. Don’t be duped.
Congressional oversight matters. Our government has real issues that require resolution. The party in power can use the committee process to tweak, or to fundamentally reform, how government works where necessary. Political showmanship does nothing to move the country forward. Republicans identified real problems in the run-up to the midterms, issues Americans want to see the two parties work on together for the common good, like immigration and inflation. Using the process purely as a campaign tactic, trying to make a political opponent’s numbers drop, is shameful.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
The Subcommittee to Obstruct Biden, silly. Or simply put: “The SOBs.”
...Subcommittee on the Politicizing Everything Weaponization...(SPEW Committee)