FBI director doubles staff to respond to House subpoena over agency's work

[riversedge]

Source: CNN


By Laura Jarrett

Updated 8:58 PM ET, Tue March 27, 2018

(CNN)FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday he is doubling the number of FBI personnel tasked with reviewing a large set of documents demanded by Republican House members related to a wide range of controversial decisions made by the FBI.
...........................

Last week, Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, issued a subpoena for documents relating to the FBI's investigation into former Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state, the FBI's "potential abuses" of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in monitoring Trump campaign aide Carter Page and the internal recommendation by FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Though a seemingly disparate trio of issues, all related to recent Republican accusations of political bias that have regularly circulated on Fox News programming.

But a Justice Department source told CNN that Sessions is fed up with seeing his department lambasted about these outstanding requests and he has told Wray that the pace is "unacceptable," the source said.
..............................
Wray said in a statement Tuesday that the FBI had already assigned 27 staff members to respond to Goodlatte's requests, but acknowledged "the current pace of production is too slow."................

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/27/politics/christopher-wray-bob-goodlatte/index.html?sr=twCNNp032718christopher-wray-bob-goodlatte0900PMStory&CNNPolitics=Tw

---

The last thing we need to waste tax dollars on is investigating Hillary emails. we need money for infrastructure, schools, health, our environment etc. Please call your rep and Senators-both dem and Repug. This is beyond the pale!

Link to tweet

[Maeve]

1. So Sessions is fed-up? What is going to do?

Stamp his foot so hard into the ground he ends up tearing himself in two, like Rumplestiltskin did?

[Scoopster]

2. Sessions is playing along. This is an attempt to drown the FBI.

Republicans simply can't get over the fact that this has been investigated ad nauseam and has proven over & over again that there was no wrongdoing. And at the same time, they want to pull resources away from helping any investigation into the theft of this country by a gang of criminals assisted by a foreign power.

[politicaljunkie41910]

7. Trying to come up with reasons to claim that the FBI leadership is incompetent and fire them

and replace with the Dotards flunkies, so they can fire Mueller. Also so they can clean up their mess related to the House members and Devin Nunez wild goose chases.

[Farmer-Rick]

3. RepubliCONS trying to get dirt on Hillary and info on Mueller's investigation

To warn Trump and use Hillary as a distraction. Sounds like Putin is giving them advice. These are classic Putin manuevers lacking only in a few murders.

No matter how horrible, how traitorous, how immoral and disgusting, the evidence of Trump's crimes are, the RepubliCONS are going to cover for him. Don't expect them to do anything else.

[karynnj]

4. The number of people required to review/redact etc the documents requested shows the magnitude

of the Republican document request.

This is similar to the State Department in 2015/2016 having to greatly increase the number of people dealing with Congressional and FOIA requests. There, at least, we knew what these people had to go through. All of the Clinton and staff emails (from her server) returned to the State Department. Giving Congress ALL the SD emails of a Secretary of State was unprecedented. Part of this is that the amount of Secretary SD email was relatively new and growing and part of it could be blamed on Clinton herself calling for all the emails to be made public online. (Here, I suspect that Clinton called for this because she likely knew Congress would demand all of it and she could claim doing it showed her transparency.)

For a year and a half, as the SD increased and even assigned a person to manage the increasing number of people skilled enough to process the emails, Congress and the Republican allies in the media expressed disbelief that it should take that much time to carefully process and that it was difficult to staff all the positions created quickly due to the need for them to have security clearances and the knowledge to redact everything that should be redacted. The right has continued to attack the SD when Tillerson was not able to process things faster - even as he put many high level career people into doing this.

In 2015, 2016, each batch of emails produced by the SD following the court ordered schedule to release them led to a pretty innocuous set of emails without even a smoking cap pistol. However, it also led to another story about the fact that Clinton had her emails on her own server. It served to keep the story in the news on a monthly basis.

In the FBI, the documents are not as clearly understood, but given the number of people who were already working on getting them - before they spoke of doubling the staff - suggests that this request is even bigger. It looks like they are fishing to find anything that they can then cherry pick to back their contention that the FBI was partisan and covered for Clinton. (Because nothing says covering for Clinton more than the Comey letters shortly before the election !!) If this is a fishing expedition, one thing that Democrats need to insist on is that committee Democrats and their staff have equal access to the documents produced.

[Nitram]

5. It's a fishing expedition by Republicans that will end up being a wild goose chase.

Wasting tax payer's money and putting lives at risk because the FBI has fewer resources to work on real security issues.

[Mr. Ected]

6. Republicans turn everything into a political witch hunt

Whereas Mueller's investigation implicates an entire political party of conspiring to commit treason.

It takes an analytical mind to discern the difference, something the knee jerkers on the right simply don't understand.

[FakeNoose]

8. Maybe Mueller should be investigating this