House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte on Thursday subpoenaed the memos kept by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the latest step in the Republican effort to investigate what they say are questionable Justice Department and FBI actions during the 2016 presidential election.
“[G]iven the department’s ongoing delays and/or refusal to produce these documents, I am left with no choice but to issue the enclosed subpoena to compel their production,” Goodlatte, R-Va., wrote in his Thursday letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions explaining the subpoena.
Goodlatte set an Oct. 4 deadline to provide the documents.
In addition to all documents and communications related to the memos, Goodlatte subpoenaed the file related to the first application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant authorizing surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Republicans have charged that the FISA warrant against Page is tainted because it used information contained in the dossier written by Christopher Steele, a former British spy. Steele was hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS to compile the dossier connecting Trump to Russia, and Fusion GPS was paid by Democrats.
The political motive behind the dossier was not fully laid out in the FISA warrant application, which Republicans say makes the basis of the federal government’s Russia investigation biased.
The subpoena was issued after last week’s New York Times report, which claimed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein suggested secretly recording President Trump, as well as the idea of using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Rosenstein blasted the report as “false,” and denied making those comments.
Details of the comments, which were made in May 2017 before the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, were reportedly corroborated by McCabe’s memos.
An attorney for McCabe issued a statement last week acknowledging that such memos exist. “Andrew McCabe drafted memos to memorialize significant discussions he had with high level officials and preserved them so he would have an accurate, contemporaneous record of those discussions,” said Michael Bromwich in a statement. “When he was interviewed by the Special Counsel more than a year ago, he gave all of his memos — classified and unclassified — to the Special Counsel’s office. A set of those memos remained at the FBI at the time of his departure in late January 2018. He has no knowledge of how any member of the media obtained those memos.”
Congressional investigators have so far not been privy to McCabe’s memos. Mueller’s team does have the memos, however.
There has been speculation that Rosenstein’s job was in jeopardy following the report, but Trump said Wednesday that “preference would be to keep him, to let him finish up” the Russia investigation. The two are set to meet next week to discuss the report.
Rosenstein oversees Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and potential connections to the Trump campaign, which the president has consistently dubbed a “hoax” and “witch-hunt.”
