Conyers Says DOJ Disclosure Not Enough, Subpoena Still Stands
Despite the release of nearly 3,000 pages of documents on Friday related to the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys last year, including some materials that had been previously withheld, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) says the Justice Department still has not fully complied with a subpoena issued by his panel, setting up a potential showdown next week between Congress and the Bush administration over the purged prosecutors.
In a letter Friday to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Conyers suggested the Justice Department’s credibility with the House Judiciary Committee is practically non-existent, and therefore, a subpoena issued to the department for documents remains in force. That subpoena expires on Monday.
“The fact that we have had to resort to subpoena to obtain the documents we need for meaningful oversight means that we are beyond the point of being able to accept the Department’s unilateral judgment about which documents to produce and which to redact or withhold,” Conyers told Gonzales.
Conyers was responding to a letter to the House and Senate Judiciary committees from Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard Hertling that accompanied the document dump. In that letter, Hertling stated that DOJ officials believed they had already released enough information to comply with the House subpoena and were willing to negotiate over most of the rest.
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