Where can I find the “no congressional do-over” clause in the constitution?
by digby
Basically the White House is saying that they will decide what the congress’s job is. Because Trump is our king, apparently:
The White House’s top lawyer told the House Judiciary Committee chairman Wednesday that Congress has no right to a “do-over” of the special counsel’s investigation of President Trump and refused a broad demand for records and testimony from dozens of current and former White House staff.
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s letter to committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) constitutes a sweeping rejection — not just of Nadler’s request for White House records, but of Congress’s standing to investigate Trump for possible obstruction of justice. In his letter, Cipollone repeated a claim the White House and Trump’s business have begun making: that Congress is not a law enforcement body and does not have a legitimate purpose to investigate the questions it is pursuing.
But Cipollone stopped short of asserting executive privilege. Instead, he told Nadler he would consider a narrowed request if the chairman spells out the legislative purpose and legal support for the information he is seeking.
“Congressional investigations are intended to obtain information to aid in evaluating potential legislation, not to harass political opponents or to pursue an unauthorized ‘do-over’ of exhaustive law enforcement investigations conducted by the Department of Justice,” Cipollone wrote.
Cipollone said the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report now makes Congress’s questions moot. He stressed that probe was “exhaustive” — the product of 2,800 subpoenas, 500 executed search warrants and 500 witness interviews — and that the president supported the report’s full release “in the interest of transparency.”
“The appropriate course is for the Committee to discontinue the inquiry,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, it appears that you have already decided to press ahead with a duplicative investigation, including by issuing subpoenas, to replow the same ground the Special Counsel has already covered.”
All of this is going to come as a surprise to the people who ran over 10 Benghazi investigations, 8 years of Whitewater investigations, including several Independent counsels and dozens of congressional probes.
I realize those we all ok because they were in pursuit of Democrats and so posed a threat to the nation. But still, it certainly shines new light on the last 40 years of our political history. Apparently, congress needed to prove to the White House that it had a purpose they approve of before they would agree to cooperate.
This is new.
.