I’m sure the media will be up in arms over this blatant attempt at intimidating legislators looking into government abuses some time between next Thursday and never. But it shows how open this war between elected and unelected officials is becoming.
The emails memorialized a January 2018 closed-door meeting involving senior FBI and Justice Department officials as well as members of the House Intelligence Committee. The account claimed Rosenstein threatened to turn the tables on the committee’s inquiries regarding the Russia probe.
“The DAG [Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein] criticized the Committee for sending our requests in writing and was further critical of the Committee’s request to have DOJ/FBI do the same when responding,” the committee’s then-senior counsel for counterterrorism Kash Patel wrote to the House Office of General Counsel. “Going so far as to say that if the Committee likes being litigators, then ‘we [DOJ] too [are] litigators, and we will subpoena your records and your emails,’ referring to HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] and Congress overall.”
The story from the DOJ said is…
The Deputy Attorney General was making the point—after being threatened with contempt — that as an American citizen charged with the offense of contempt of Congress, he would have the right to defend himself, including requesting production of relevant emails and text messages and calling them as witnesses to demonstrate that their allegations are false,” the official said. “That is why he put them on notice to retain relevant emails and text messages, and he hopes they did so. (We have no process to obtain such records without congressional approval.)”
Further, the official said that when Rosenstein returns to the United States from a work trip, “he will request that the House General counsel conduct an internal investigation of these Congressional staffers’ conduct.”
You can’t subpoena me, I’m going to subpoena you!
That’s where the guy holding Mueller’s leash is. So we’ve got a DOJ operating in defiance of the White House and Congress. So whom is it accountable to? And let’s not have any Comeyesque nonsense about higher duties and loyalties. Unelected officials aren’t accountable to higher loyalties in a free country. (The SS motto, eine Ehre Heist Treue, My honor is loyalty, comes to mind.) They’re accountable to elected officials.
Except certain officials in the DOJ no longer seem to be.
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