Republicans Secure More Subpoena Power in Push to Discredit Russia Inquiry

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/politics/republicans-subpoena-russia-inquiry.html

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Senate Republicans plunged forward on Thursday with an election-year bid to discredit the Trump-Russia investigation, voting to give themselves expansive authority to subpoena dozens of national security aides and several high-ranking Obama administration officials, including a top campaign adviser to President Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The party-line vote by the Judiciary Committee was the second time in a week that a Republican-led panel has moved to expand its reach by granting its chairman the power to unilaterally compel documents and testimony related to the Russia matter. In both cases, Republicans are seeking to tarnish the investigators and to recast Mr. Trump and his campaign not as beneficiaries of Russian assistance in 2016, but as victims of dangerous overreach by a Democratic administration and law enforcement officials.

“We need to look long and hard at how the Mueller investigation got off the rails,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the Judiciary Committee chairman, said before the vote, referring to the special counsel who led the inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III. “This committee is not going to sit on the sidelines and move on.”

With a vote of 12 to 10, with every Democrat opposed, the committee granted Mr. Graham the authority to issue subpoenas to more than 50 officials, including a who’s who of top security aides under both the Obama and Trump administrations. They include Denis R. McDonough, President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff; Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser; and Steve Ricchetti, who was Mr. Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president and is now a top adviser to his presidential campaign. He can also compel cooperation from Attorney General William P. Barr and Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, as well as other agents and officials involved in the case, known internally as Crossfire Hurricane.

Mr. Graham plans to hold public hearings in the weeks ahead not only highlighting errors and omissions by investigators that have already been uncovered by a Justice Department inspector general, but also building a broader case to the public that some investigators criminally abused their authorities. The inspector general, by comparison, said he found no reason to question the outcome of the special counsel’s investigation.

Many of the targets mirrored those laid out a week ago by Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who granted their chairman similar powers to demand documents and testimony. The two inquiries overlap and are being loosely coordinated, but Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the homeland security chairman, appears more focused on actions taken by the Obama administration during the presidential transition in late 2016 and early 2017.

Democrats roundly opposed the subpoenas on Thursday, accusing Republicans of using the committee as a tool of electoral politics.

“Never has a chairman devoted the full weight of this committee’s resources to pursue a wholly partisan investigation after being prompted by a presidential campaign,” said Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and a former chairman of the panel. He also noted that it was unusual for a Senate chairman to move so directly to use subpoenas, rather than try to secure voluntary cooperation first.

Democrats complained that Mr. Graham was wasting the time of the committee when its members should be debating urgent questions about policing and racism that are gripping the country, as well as the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Our country is facing three crises: A health pandemic, an economic catastrophe and systemic racism and police violence,” said Senator Mazie K. Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii. “But rather than doing something concrete about these crises, this committee is asking for blanket subpoena authority to go over ground that has already been covered.”

In a session that grew tense at times, Democrats proposed more than a dozen changes to the subpoena power. Some would have given Democratic lawmakers authority to subpoena witnesses of their own or compelled Mr. Graham to subpoena Trump associates tied up in the Russia matter. Others directed the committee to investigate Mr. Barr’s role in forcefully removing peaceful protesters outside the White House this month so Mr. Trump could be photographed holding a Bible in front of a nearby church.

Each failed on party lines.

Mr. Graham promised Democrats that he would be willing to call Mr. Mueller or one of his deputies to testify if the minority party asked. Mr. Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee last year, but never appeared in the Senate to discuss his voluminous report.

But Mr. Graham grew agitated at Democrats’ pointed critiques of his work, and reminded them that as the minority, they had no power to prevent him from moving forward.

“You are trying to stop me from doing something I think the country needs to do, and I am not going to be stopped,” he declared.