Gowdy accuses DOJ of stonewalling
Rep. Trey Gowdy, the House Oversight Committee chairman, said Sunday that he is displeased with how many documents the Department of Justice is withholding from members of the House and Senate intelligence committee members.
In an interview on Fox News, the South Carolina Republican said the department is “going to have to do better than a thousand pages here and there.” Gowdy’s comments are in response to the department’s announcement Friday that it would produce 1,000 pages of materials to the House Judiciary Committee in response to a subpoena from its chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte.
Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, subpoenaed the Justice Department in March for documents related to some controversial FBI actions, including the decision in 2016 to not charge Hillary Clinton after the probe of her use of an email server as secretary of state and an FBI office’s internal recommendation to fire the bureau’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe.
Gowdy told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that he didn’t understand why the department would provide its inspector general with “a million” pages of documents, but give Congress only “a fraction of that.”
“I cannot help them explain a million documents to the inspector general and a fraction of that to the entity who created and funds the FBI,” Gowdy said.
“So if Congress is entitled to this information, we shouldn’t get it in thousand page increments,” he said. “The inspector general has a million pages.”
Expressing annoyance with the department, Gowdy said, “I want to be able to support the FBI and DOJ, but the world’s premiere law enforcement agency can’t seem to operate a copying machine. That’s inexplicable.”
The Justice Department also announced Friday that it would let all House and Senate intelligence committee members review the application that it and the FBI used to obtain a surveillance warrant on former Trump aide Carter Page.
