Republicans Just DECLARED WAR On DOJ, FBI
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Things are about to get VERY interesting. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is threatening to go after the Justice Department and the FBI and charge them with contempt of Congress. This is over withholding details regarding why a top FBI investigator was removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the presidential campaign last summer. This same investigator had an affair with another investigator on the team. He is virulently anti-Trump, as is the investigator he was sleeping with. Peter Strzok has been involved in a number of high profile investigations including Hillary Clinton’s infamous email scandal. He is grossly biased in Clinton’s favor.
“I have instructed House Intelligence Committee staff to begin drawing up a contempt of Congress resolution for DOJ Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray,” California Rep. Devin Nunes, the Republican chair of the committee, said in a statement over the weekend. Today is the deadline for the DOJ and the FBI to comply with the committee’s list of demands, which includes requests for interviews with Rosenstein, Wray and deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, as well as documents related to the anti-Trump dossier written by former British spy Christopher Steele. This has the potential to become an all-out war between the Republicans and the DOJ and FBI.
For months, committee Republicans have tried to force the DOJ and FBI to provide details of the Russia investigation. They have been stonewalled at every turn. At the heart of this is how much these agencies relied on that fake dossier to form a basis for their probe into Trump and his campaign. The straw that broke the agency’s back came when it was revealed that FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok was kicked off of Mueller’s investigative team after he exchanged anti-Trump text messages with his mistress, an FBI lawyer named Lisa Page who also worked on Mueller’s team. As I understand it, she’s been reassigned just as he has.
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Department of Justice’s inspector general discovered the text messages as part of an investigation into how the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation. I find that fascinating and not all that surprising. In August, Strzok was removed from the Mueller team. But Mueller’s office, the FBI and the DOJ have left the circumstances of his ouster clouded in mystery for months, not bothering to reveal that this happened. So much for transparency. If you can believe it (and sadly I can), Strzok has been reassigned to the FBI’s human resources department, probably until all this dies down.
Nunes was very blunt over all this. He accused the FBI and DOJ of “hiding” information about Strzok’s “documented political bias.” Good for him. “In light of today’s press reports, we now know why Strzok was dismissed, why the FBI and DOJ refused to provide us this explanation, and at least one reason why they previously refused to make Deputy [FBI] Director [Andrew] McCabe available to the Committee for an interview,” said Nunes.
Here’s a thought… scrap both agencies and freaking start over. Fire Mueller as well. What a mess.
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