The Justice Stonewall Continues The House Intel Committee can’t see all of a key electronic memo.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-justice-stonewall-continues-1523219016
Hours after we published an editorial Friday about the Justice Department’s refusal to turn over a document subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee, Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) received an official response from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd.
It was cleverly spun. Mr. Boyd played up the access to the secondary information Mr. Nunes had demanded—access to the application and renewals for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants on one-time Trump associate Carter Page. Mr. Boyd describes his department’s response as “extraordinary accommodation.”
Upon inspection, however, the focus on the FISA warrants looks more like an effort to distract attention from Mr. Boyd’s refusal even to mention Mr. Nunes’s main request of FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. That request was for the “electronic communication,” or memo, that officially launched the counterintelligence investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
On Friday Trey Gowdy, an Intel Committee member who has seen a redacted form of the memo, said Justice has redacted the “good stuff.” He means information that would tell whether the counterintelligence investigation was credible, and how and whether the FBI vetted the information. “All of that,” Mr. Gowdy said, “is in a paragraph I can’t read.”
Justice says the blacked-out paragraph can’t be shared with Congress because it identifies a foreign country that shares intelligence with the U.S. This is a hard argument to credit, given that in December someone told the New York Times that Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was the source for the information that minor Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos had bragged about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. In February former CIA Director John Brennan referred to the FBI’s relationship with British intelligence when asked about the information on Mr. Papadopoulos.
Mr. Nunes needs this information because it is crucial to understanding whether Justice and the FBI had good reason to launch this investigation—and how they handled it. The Papadopoulos narrative matters to the FBI, because attributing the launch of the investigation to him minimizes the role of the now infamous Steele dossier.
Some suspect that the real reason Justice is keeping this paragraph secret is because it might reveal embarrassing facts about how the Papadopoulos information was used. This might include a role for political actors (rather than intelligence officials) in ginning up the Trump-Russia investigation.
Meanwhile, on Saturday President Trump asked in a tweet what “Justice and the FBI have to hide”? He added, “Why aren’t they giving the strongly requested documents (unredacted) to the HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE?”—which has subpoenaed similar information about FBI actions during the 2016 election.
The President might ask the same about the stonewalling of the Intel Committee. Do Mr. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions think that ignoring the committee’s main request is in the spirit of the “extraordinary accommodation” that Mr. Boyd claims?
The Justice Department is part of the executive branch. If either Mr. Sessions or Mr. Trump believes Mr. Boyd is not being responsive to Congress, one of them should put someone there who will be.
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