'Justice Department Failure': Grassley Lambasts Garland For Not Declassifying Mueller Report Docs

on another matter mr president on january the 19th of this year then president trump issued a memorandum to attorney general to the director of national intelligence and the director of the central intelligence agency that memo directed these agencies to declassify certain crossfire hurricane records for public dissemination we all know about the fatal defects and political decisions that were made during crossfire hurricane that type of improper government conduct demands maximum transparency the only way you can trust the government is make sure that everything that can be made public ought to be made public and the only exceptions that would be personal privacy national security issues and intelligence matters everything else is the public's business and can be made public without hurting people or hurting our national security on february 25th then this year my staff and senator johnson staff requested an update from the justice department on what's been declassified we want to know when a full and complete set of declassified records will be provided to the congress of the united states since february our respective staffs have followed up with the justice department on countless emails and phone calls attorney general garland has consistently failed to provide a substantive update we are now in december and attorney general garland hasn't produced a single declassified record to congress relating to crossfire hurricane more importantly attorney general garland has kept the american people in the dark now the justice department hasn't claimed that the durham investigation is a basis for refusing to provide these records so what's the delay all about is the attorney general trying to shield the justice department and the fbi from further embarrassment because that's why we don't get a lot of stuff public because some bureaucrats going to be embarrassed by weak it was reported that an alternative mueller report has been located at the justice department now i don't know what that's all about reportedly doj could release it soon this report if you want to call it a report was drafted by andrew weissman's team while he served on special counsel mueller's trump investigation now i want you to know this is the same andrew weissman who wiped his government phone while working on the that investigation many of his colleagues did the same thing to over a dozen phones these acts may have deleted deleted federal records that could be key to better understanding their decision making process as they pursued their investigation and wrote their report on september the 11th last year i wrote to the justice department asking about the potential violence violation of the federal record keeping laws i also asked what steps the justice department had taken to recover these deleted records in response then the usual response the department failed to answer these questions instead it provided a letter from the inspector general rather than providing a full and complete answer for itself the inspector general said that 96 phones were assigned to the mueller team but the justice department can't locate 59 of those phones initially the justice department took possession of 79 of 96 phones based on the information provided to me and senator johnson from the inspector general it appears then that 74 were reviewed for official record-keeping purposes that's only 74 out of 96 phones accordingly 22 of mueller's team's phones weren't reviewed for federal record-keeping purposes so who we we need to know who those phones belong to this is beyond suspicious and the attorney general doesn't seem to have a care in the world the inspector general told us that there's a document called the sco inventory and property transfer document that would give us a better idea of the federal record-keeping process during the mueller investigation today or to date attorney general garland has failed to produce that document so what we have here is yet another example of a complete and total justice department failure on the one hand the biden justice department has no idea what records should be classified should be declassified pursuant to presidents trump's january 2021 declassification order the biden justice department has failed to tell congress what if anything it's done to retrieve the missing mueller phones the biden justice department has also failed to provide the mueller's team's existing text messages and other records yet can you believe it on the other hand the justice department will reportedly soon release an alternative mueller report because a federal court made them do it congress has an independent constitutional oversight authority and that authority requires the executive branch to be responsive to oversight requests irrespective of any federal litigation the obvious message from the biden justice department is that it will stiff-arm congressional oversight that could prove embarrassing to the federal government or it's like garland saying screw you senators our institutions won't survive with that way of doing the people's business transparency brings accountability probably my colleagues are tired of my saying that transparency brings accountability but none of us should stop working to hold government officials accountable for their improper conduct regardless of their political party i yield the floor

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Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021