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The House Democrats' House Intelligence Committee criticizes two Justice officials for declaring that the ministry may ultimately refuse to grant the congressional court documents from Special Advocate Robert Mueller's investigation. highest democrat denouncing these claims as "absolutely unbearable".
Speaking at a forum in Washington DC on Tuesday morning, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Said he wanted to start the event by responding directly to a news report. ABC News of the day before – a report that seemed to offer the first The complete response of the Department of Justice to the claims of Schiff and other Democrats that the failure to submit the final report of Mueller or other evidence he would have discovered would amount to "applying a double standard".
"We may have seen a more substantial indication that the Department of Justice could take a restrictive view on what it can share with Congress or the public," Schiff said of what the two justice ministry officials anonymously told ABC News in Tuesday's report. "Make no mistake, it would be a double graphic standard."
Expressing with ABC News on the condition of anonymity, the two senior officials of the Justice Department insisted that the requests for information from Mueller's investigation emanating of the Congress were different from requests for information from other recent high-profile cases, notably because, among other reasons, no federal law enforcement official spoke publicly about the details of the probe Mueller.
In previous cases, such as the FBI's investigation into the use of a private email server by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, public statements of the 39, former FBI director James Comey, on the possibility for the Justice Department to deny that some investigative documents were to remain confidential, the two officials of the Justice Department told ABC News.
Schiff rejected this assessment, saying, "This is not something that the ministry can pose at James Comey's feet".
In addition, said Schiff, "the public's interest in getting a complete accounting of what Bob Mueller has been able to produce in the last two years is … far more important than in the survey. by e-mail, since [Mueller’s probe] whether the president or his entourage may be compromised by a foreign power ".
Call CQ-Roll via Getty Images, FILE
In fact, when Republicans controlled Congress and finally summoned elements of Clinton's email survey, the Department of Justice gave legislators access to 880,000 pages of documents.
Then, when Republicans accused the Justice Department of abusing its authority to target Trump's restricted circle and threatened to condemn senior officials in defiance of Congress, the ministry offered legislators access to a wide range of documents from the FBI's investigation of Russia's interference in the newspaper. presidential campaign, including very sensitive documents related to Americans included in the survey.
"The need for the Department of Justice to appear impartial, no matter who controls the convention, requires the provision of a [Mueller’s] materials, "said Schiff, at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
But justice ministry officials who spoke to ABC News said that in the case of Mueller, investigations and prosecutions were still ongoing to protect.
By contrast, when the Ministry of Justice provided Congress with hundreds of thousands of pages related to Clinton's email survey, the investigation was "over and over," one official said. And when the Justice Department provided the Congress with documents relating to the FBI's investigation of Russia, it only shared the documents when the investigations were completed or when the disclosure of documents could not have an impact on operations, according to officials.
In a letter to the Congress at the time, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein stated that the "voluminous" production of documents had been carried out "so as not to undermine the integrity of the investigations. course ".
Meanwhile, Rosenstein recently reiterated – in the public – a long-standing ministry policy prohibiting the disclosure of information that could harm non-accused persons.
Last year, the Inspector General of the Ministry of Justice concluded that Comey had broken this policy by announcing in July 2016 that Clinton and his associates should not be prosecuted, even if they were. " extremely careless "in the treatment of confidential information.
Without these public comments, the Department of Justice could have retained congressional documents on the grounds that they reflected internal deliberations, according to the two senior officials who spoke to ABC News anonymously. But "from the start, we had a very, very weak litigation position because" Comey had in fact waived this privilege, said one of the officials.
On Tuesday, Schiff insisted that the Justice Ministry "must obviously maintain its investigative interests, but that this can not be considered an absolute obstacle to the provision of documents to Congress." And, Schiff said, the ministry has practically no "absolute policy" of refusing to disclose information about non-accused persons.
He spoke of the Department of Justice's ultimate desire to send Republicans to Congress thousands of text messages exchanged between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who tirelessly criticized Trump for from the FBI email inquiry, Clinton, and related to Russia. investigation.
Strzok and Page "have not been the subject of an indictment," noted Schiff.
Democrats worry that even if Mueller fails to find evidence of criminal acts, he might find evidence of misconduct that the public could never see.
"People have the right to know, and Congress has the right to know," said last week Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives of the House of Representatives of New Zealand. "It's our job to hold the president to account."
Mueller could send his final report to Barr in the coming days. It is not expected that he will detail the findings of derivative investigations that Mueller has referred to the country's prosecutors for them to pursue separately.
Barr publicly promised legislators that he would then send his own "report" on Mueller's investigation to Congress. It is not clear what the scope of this document will be.
Schiff and Nadler said they would sue the Trump administration for evidence of Mueller if necessary.
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