Senate Republicans moved on Thursday to grant themselves vast new powers for a sprawling election-year effort to discredit the Trump-Russia investigation, with one committee authorizing subpoenas for dozens of high-level Obama administration officials, and another lining up a similar vote for next week.
The actions by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee laid the groundwork for months of public hearings that Republicans hope will recast the findings of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The goal is to undercut a central conclusion — that President Trump welcomed Moscow’s meddling on his behalf — and instead portray Mr. Trump as a victim of corrupt overreach by the Obama administration and anti-Trump Republicans inside the F.B.I.
Democrats on both panels strenuously objected, accusing Republicans of abusing their majority in the Senate to pursue nakedly political inquiries intended to hand Mr. Trump ammunition in his re-election campaign and smear the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Adding to the discord, the votes unfolded against a tumultuous backdrop, as the country is consumed with the health and economic crises of the coronavirus pandemic along with nationwide unrest over police brutality and racial discrimination — all issues that fall in the jurisdiction of the two committees.
“Instead of engaging in political partisan games on behalf of the president, what the American people need this committee to do is be relevant to why they are shouting and marching and crying in the streets of our country,” said Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California and a member of the judiciary panel.
Over Democrats’ protests, the Homeland Security Committee voted 8 to 6 to empower its chairman, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, to issue subpoenas to 35 current and former officials, including James B. Comey, a former F.B.I. director; Denis R. McDonough, President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff; Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser; Jacob J. Lew, Mr. Obama’s Treasury secretary; and other F.B.I., Justice Department and State Department officials involved in the inquiry, known internally as Crossfire Hurricane.
In the Judiciary Committee, where Democrats came prepared with nearly two dozen counterproposals, the debate was so fierce that the chairman, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, postponed a final vote on his subpoena authority until next week to accommodate senators’ wishes to speak.
That vote will hand Mr. Graham similar authority to subpoena documents and more than 50 current and former officials for testimony, including many of those sought by Mr. Johnson as well as Steve Ricchetti, who was Mr. Biden’s chief of staff as vice president and is now a top aide to his presidential campaign.
Mr. Graham told outraged Democrats that he would soon dedicate a hearing to issues of race and policing. But he defended his focus on poking holes in the year-old Russia investigation, arguing that errors and omissions in the process uncovered by the Justice Department’s inspector general proved the entire investigation was corrupt. The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, did not share that broad conclusion.
“The public can judge whether I am on some cause for Trump or not,” Mr. Graham said. “We’re not going to have a rule of law for Republicans and rule of law for Democrats, where it’s OK to turn the Republican nominee’s life upside down and when you find out there was abuses in that system, not to ask questions how that happened to make sure it never happens again to anybody.”
Mr. Johnson went further, suggesting without proof that the Obama administration had tried to sabotage Mr. Trump as he assumed the presidency.
“America has long been admired for its peaceful and cooperative transitions of power,” he said. “However, evidence is mounting that this is not what happened in the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations.”
Rarely have Senate committees granted such broad authority to chairmen to compel testimony and records on any topic, much less on a purely partisan basis. While such authority is more common in the House, where majorities in recent years have used their power to unilaterally investigate figures of opposing parties, the Senate had maintained a more restrained, bipartisan approach.
The motions put forward by Republicans in both committees would not automatically issue subpoenas for the individuals in question, but would give Mr. Johnson and Mr. Graham unilateral authority going forward to dispatch subpoenas when they saw fit.
The vote by the homeland security panel also gave Mr. Johnson the authority to issue subpoenas for records related to the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Justice Department’s inspector general, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the inspector general of the General Services Administration.
But Democrats said they suspected the real goal was to tarnish those whom Mr. Trump viewed as his political enemies.
“Put simply, this motion — and I’m sorry to say this, but I believe it — grants the chair unbridled authority to go after Obama-era officials,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. “I can’t support this kind of dragnet authority to conduct politically motivated investigations.”
Democrats did not dispute that mistakes had been made by the Crossfire Hurricane investigative team, but they noted that those issues were already being explored, and argued that Republicans were using the errors — which related to a warrant to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser — to try to undermine the entire special counsel investigation.
Mr. Graham’s committee previewed its strategy on Wednesday, when at its first public hearing on the topic, Republicans pressed Rod J. Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general who appointed the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, to concede that there had not been sufficient evidence in 2017 to continue the investigation. Mr. Rosenstein defended the inquiry, but said he would not have signed off on a wiretap if he had known at the time that it contained factual errors and omissions.
Mr. Johnson has indicated he is more interested in highlighting the origins of a dossier of opposition research on the Trump campaign and Russia assembled by a former British spy and cited by investigators. He will also focus on requests made by Obama administration officials to reveal the identities of unnamed Americans, who later turned out to be Trump associates, mentioned in intelligence reports.
Mr. Johnson is separately investigating unsubstantiated claims that Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, corruptly helped a Ukrainian energy company curry favor with the Obama administration while his father was vice president.
Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a member of the homeland security panel, was the lone Republican to criticize the investigations, saying that he was concerned they were “politically motivated.”
“This committee’s inquiry is not entirely without basis,” Mr. Romney said, “but as you know, I believe there are far more urgent priorities the committee should address, particularly given the trauma in our country from Covid-19, a shattered economy, widespread protests against systemic racism, foreign cyberattacks, and the list goes on and on.”
But ultimately, Mr. Romney said he would not “stand in the way,” and voted in favor of granting Mr. Johnson the additional authority.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
