Three powerful House committee chairs asked Capital One for documents last month related to President Donald Trump’s business empire — and the financial giant said it was already preserving documents but needs a subpoena in order to comply, according to letters obtained by POLITICO.
The March 11 request from House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) comes amid intensifying congressional scrutiny of the president’s financial records and tax returns.
The lawmakers asked Capital One for all documents related to the president’s revocable trust, the Trump Organization and other subsidiaries of his financial empire. Notably, the Democrats asked for documents that might have been turned over to special counsel Robert Mueller.
In a March 21 response to the committee leaders, Capital One executive Brent M. Timberlake said the corporation is “preserving the documents and materials,” but could only turn over the information if the committees issue a subpoena.
California Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday he was planning to send eight criminal referrals to Attorney General William Barr as soon as this week.
Nunes, who investigated accusations of FBI and Department of Justice abuse while he was previously chairman of the intelligence panel, did not say who he would be referring in a Fox News interview on Sunday.
Appearing on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Nunes said five of the referrals are related to lying to Congress, misleading Congress and leaking classified information.
The other referrals, Nunes said, are allegations of lying to the FISA court that approves foreign surveillance warrants, manipulating intelligence and what he described as a “global leak referral,” which Nunes said wasn’t tied to one individual.
Excerpt from Day 722
Atty James Baker has been pretty informative about what went down in Justice Dept…He was the one who spoke with Benjamin Wittes a few months back and said the Obstruction was the collusion.
I like what I hear from him.
Here’s the previous link from January Day 722
Lawfare Blog Benjamin Wittes poses a further question about whether the fact that the President sought to obstruct the Russian Investigation, via firing of Comey, which sent the FBI into another investigation about the President…is indeed at the core of what Mueller must be looking for.
Just as it’s title suggests -
What if the Obstruction Was the Collusion? On the New York Times’s Latest Bombshell
Wittes had discussions w/ Michael Schmidt NYT and had a long interview for former FBI lawyer James Baker, who said the investigation is about…“It was about Russia. It was always about Russia. Full stop.”
Topic header has been updated.
More on the Baker testimony from Politico
Under questioning in 2018 from a Democratic committee lawyer, Baker described numerous officials who were distressed that the president may have obstructed justice when he fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. Baker said he had personal concerns and that they were shared by not just top FBI brass but within other divisions and at the Justice Department as well.
[…]
“The leadership of the FBI, so the acting director … The heads of the national security apparatus, the national security folks within the FBI, the people that were aware of the underlying investigation and who had been focused on it,” Baker said, running through a list of officials he said were worried that the president may have fired Comey to hinder the Russia investigation.
Baker said other FBI executives informed him that Justice Department officials raised concerns about obstruction by Trump as well.
Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers Wednesday that he will be looking to the “genesis” of the the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into potential ties between members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government began in 2016, saying, “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal” – echoing some of the more inflammatory claims lobbed by President Donald Trump for months, but declining to elaborate on his concerns.
"I think spying did occur," Barr said, though he declined to provide the basis for his concern. "The question is whether it was . . . adequately predicated."
The news will likely be viewed as a welcome development to the President, who has regularly called for an investigation and, as recently as last week, told reporters more should be done to examine the origins of the Russia probe.
More from the Baker testimony
James Baker, the former top lawyer of the FBI, said senior bureau officials — including at least one deemed to be free of anti-Trump bias — discussed the possibility in May 2017 that President Donald Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey “at the behest of” the Russian government.
In testimony to two Republican-led committees last October, Baker described mounting concerns that crystallized in the frantic days after the FBI director’s ouster, days that were punctuated by Trump’s on-air declaration that he fired Comey because of the Russia probe and his chummy Oval Office meeting with senior Russian officials, at which he reportedly trashed Comey as a “nut job.”
Baker described a discussion in those turbulent days that he had with Andrew McCabe — who became acting FBI director after Comey’s departure — and the bureau’s top counterintelligence official Bill Priestap, as well as top national security official Carl Ghattas. He also said it was possible that bureau attorney Lisa Page and counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok — whose anti-Trump text messages have drawn attention from Trump and Republicans — attended the meeting as well.
“So there was — there was a discussion between those folks, possibly all of the folks that you’ve identified, about whether or not President Trump had been ordered to fire Jim Comey by the Russian government?” asked Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), one of the committee members interviewing Baker.
“I wouldn’t say ordered. I guess I would say … acting at the behest of and somehow following directions, somehow executing their will,” he said. “[A]nd so literally an order or not, I don’t know.”
[…]
Mueller examined whether Trump attempted to obstruct the probe, and Baker’s testimony provides a window into the FBI’s view of that question in the immediate days following Comey’s firing. Mueller, according to a limited excerpt revealed by Barr, declined to reach a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” on whether Trump obstructed justice, but Mueller’s analysis has not been revealed.
Baker said the discussion among the top officials was meant to discuss the range of possibilities behind Trump’s firing of Comey. Acting at Russia’s urging “was one extreme,” he said.
“The other extreme is that the president is completely innocent, and we discussed that too,” Baked noted. “And so — and then you have things in the middle. And so —— so that was how it came up. There’s a range of things this could possibly be. We need to investigate, because we don’t know whether, you know, the worst-case scenario is possibly true or the president is totally innocent and we need to get this thing over with — and so he can move forward with his agenda.”
“The leadership of the FBI, so the acting director … the heads of the national security apparatus, the national security folks within the FBI, the people that were aware of the underlying investigation and who had been focused on it,” Baker said, running through a list of officials he said were worried that the president might have fired Comey to hinder the Russia investigation.
Baker said other FBI executives informed him that Justice Department officials raised concerns about obstruction by Trump as well.
More Barr testimony today
The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service will not meet House Democrats’ deadline to turn over President Trump’s past tax returns by Wednesday, escalating what will likely culminate in a legal battle in the investigation into the president’s personal and business finances.
In a letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin writes that he needs more time to consult with the Department of Justice given the “unprecedented nature of this request.”
Carl Kline will appear before the House Oversight Committee April 23 to explain why he overturned security clearances for the White House.
A former White House official accused of overturning denials of security clearance during the Trump administration will appear before the House Oversight Committee on April 23, his lawyer told the panel in a letter Wednesday, despite his counsel’s pleas to postpone his testimony.
Carl Kline, who served as the White House personnel security director during the first two years of the Trump administration, will appear for the deposition as part of the panel’s long-standing investigation into security clearances under President Trump. The committee subpoenaed Kline in early April after a whistleblower in his office, Tricia Newbold, alleged that the White House was acting recklessly with the nation’s secrets by granting security clearances to individuals whom employees like her found unworthy.
Top Democrats send letter to Barr questioning his independence
Top Democrats in both the Senate and House sent a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr on Thursday reiterating their demands for him to release the full, unredacted Mueller report to Congress — while also condemning him for comments he made on Wednesday suggesting that intelligence officials “spied” on the Trump campaign in 2016.
“[W]e would be remiss not to express profound concern about your comments before the Senate Appropriations Committee regarding your apparent view of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Your testimony raises questions about your independence, appears to perpetuate a partisan narrative designed to undermine the work of the Special Counsel, and serves to legitimize President Trump’s dangerous attacks on the Department of Justice and the FBI.”
I will note that this letter includes all the Democrats in the Gang of Eight as well as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and DiFi who is on the Senate Intel Committee.
The Democratic chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee on Saturday set a new April 23 deadline for the Internal Revenue Service to comply with his request for six years of President Donald Trump’s personal and business tax returns.
Oh, interesting tidbit here,
The issue also arises as House Republicans on another committee sent the Justice Department another criminal referral — this one for Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), two of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, sent their own referral to the Justice Department for Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who they accused of lying to the committee during testimony last month.
Criminal referrals are ill-defined requests for investigation that don’t carry any official weight with prosecutors, except in rare circumstances. Officials on various House investigative committees described the process as a loose, informal request that prosecutors typically treat as glorified press releases. They only matter, committee officials emphasized, if lawmakers have exclusive evidence to back it up — such as a confidential interview transcript or documents obtained during a congressional investigation.
Apart from this unwritten process, the House has no formal mechanism to refer anyone for criminal investigation except through a contempt proceeding, which would require a vote of the full chamber.
Three House committee chairmen are requesting documents related to the administration’s proposal to release immigrants into so-called sanctuary cities in part to retaliate against Democrats in a letter sent to the White House and Department of Homeland Security.
"These reports are alarming. Not only does the administration lack the legal authority to transfer detainees in this manner, it is shocking that the President and senior Administration officials are even considering manipulating release decisions for purely political reasons," the letter from House Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler, Elijah Cummings and Bennie Thompson states.
The lawmakers request emails between White House officials and DHS officials, communication between DHS officials, along with documents, memorandum, and other materials from between November 1, 2018, and April 15.
The Justice Department expects to release on Thursday a redacted version of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report on President Trump, his associates and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, setting the stage for further battles in Congress over the politically explosive inquiry.