Justice Department officials have worried that they will have a weak argument for withholding such materials, given how much information was turned over to Congress after the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
When that investigation ended in 2016, then-FBI Director James B. Comey made public the reports of agents’ interviews with witnesses, gave public briefings to Congress and supplied additional information to lawmakers in private meetings.
Justice Department officials who cringed at that level of information-sharing and the disclosure of sensitive investigative documents did much the same after Trump fired Comey in May 2017. When Republican lawmakers demanded additional materials about both the Clinton and Russia probes, the White House squeezed the agency to comply. At one point, in early 2017, then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) refused to allow the nomination of Rod J. Rosenstein for deputy attorney general to go forward unless Grassley was provided a detailed briefing from the FBI about the Russia investigation.
Grassley got the briefing.
The trend continued after Rosenstein became the Justice Department’s second-in-command. For instance, when the president declassified a sensitive surveillance warrant, a redacted version of the document was made public. That was unprecedented, and it could affect how the notoriously tight-lipped Mueller deals with future demands for information.
“The rules for what the department turns over to Congress are based almost exclusively on precedent, and now that Republicans have established these new precedents, they’re about to find themselves hoisted on their own petard,” said Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman during the Obama administration. The department, he said, “just has no good argument why it shouldn’t provide the same transparency for the Mueller probe that it did for the Clinton investigation.”
