A trio of top Republican senators are doubling down on their demand for the Justice Department to hand over information on the handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) — the chairmen of the Judiciary, Homeland Security and Finance committees, respectively —
sent a letter Tuesday to Attorney General William Barr arguing that now that special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe has wrapped up, the department should hand over the requested documents.
“Now that the Special Counsel’s investigation has concluded, we are unaware of any legitimate basis upon which the Department can refuse to answer the Judiciary Committee’s inquiries,” the senators wrote in the letter to Barr.
The letter comes as Republicans
are pivoting to investigating Obama-era officials and scandals as they look to put Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference and the Trump campaign behind them.
Grassley, who was previously chairman of the Judiciary Committee, sent a flurry of letters to the Justice Department during the previous Congress requesting information on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe and a controversial research dossier compiled on then-candidate Trump.
GOP senators noted on Tuesday that an annex, which was not released publicly because it’s classified, included in the Justice Department inspector general report on the Clinton investigation “raises significant issues associated with the FBI’s failure to review certain highly classified information.”
Grassley requested a briefing on the information and
sent a follow-up last year with questions about the annex, but the GOP senators noted in their letter Tuesday that the Justice Department initially refused to brief the panel, citing Mueller’s investigation.
“We are reissuing the attached classified letter regarding the important questions raised by the appendix and reiterating our request for a classified briefing on the subject,” Grassley, Graham and Johnson wrote in their letter Tuesday.
Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general,
released his report last year on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton investigation. He hammered former FBI Director James Comey for poor judgment during the 2016 election but found no evidence to show his key decisions in the investigation into Clinton’s emails were improperly influenced by political bias.
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