The staffers were rushing to get subcommittee chairman Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) and Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.), who had both stepped out briefly, to return to the hearing room quickly because at that moment Democrats Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) out-numbered Rep. Nathaniel Moran, the Texas Republican temporarily chairing the hearing in Cline’s absence.
Cline’s reentry to the hearing meant there would be a tie vote, so Ivey withdrew the motion and the hearing continued. Ivey later told The Epoch Times he did so “in a spirit of cooperation.” Even so, the motion produced a close call that almost shut down the GOP majority’s latest effort to shine a spotlight on how President Joe Biden’s appointees are throwing up endless bureaucratic obstacles to frustrate and avoid congressional and public accountability.
Officially, the hearing, the third of its kind by the subcommittee in recent months, was called “to examine agency responsiveness to subpoenas and oversight requests.” But Swalwell, the ranking member on the panel, made clear in his opening statement that he and his Democratic colleagues contend that “what this is really about is the client the law firm ‘Insurrection LLC’ chaired by [House Judiciary Committee Chairman] Jim Jordan represents and that is Donald Trump.
“It’s a firm with just one client, so we’re here today because Donald Trump has been indicted, 37 counts for stealing and sharing classified documents and this hearing is an effort to defend him in the court of public opinion and to taint the jury in the case against him.”
The indictment includes counts covering obstruction of justice and other felonies that could send Trump to jail for as much as 25 years if he is convicted. Trump contends he is innocent because federal law allows a chief executive to declassify any document, and he further argues the Department of Justice (DOJ) is charging him solely because he is the leading opponent of Biden’s re-election effort.
Swalwell compared the judiciary committee Republicans’ efforts to those of the 2017 Cleveland Browns pro football team that lost all 16 of its games that season.
“I’m embarrassed for Chairman Jordan because we were promised that the crime of the century was coming from John Durham and then we learned that John Durham only took two cases to trial and he lost both of them,” Swalwell said. He also tossed in references to Hunter Biden, the judiciary committee’s select subcommittee on “weaponization of the federal government,” and other topics not related to congressional oversight.
Swalwell then put up a chart showing three quotes from Jordan in 2019 and 2020 praising former Attorney General Bill Barr, followed by Barr’s recent criticism of Trump’s actions regarding the classified documents. And he displayed a photo of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) offering merchandise proclaiming “Defund the FBI,” an apparent reference to the growing public distrust of government.
Swalwell concluded by claiming “so we'll sit here for another Browns loss, but it’s just too bad that the country is going to have go through this when we’re seeing healthcare not being addressed, our kids not being protected in their classrooms, not taking on the climate crisis across the globe, so many things people want us to focus on and we’re just going to do the bidding” of Trump.
Once the hearing proceeded to its actual business, Republicans cited multiple examples of judiciary committee document requests and subpoenas that they claim either were only partially fulfilled, and typically with a flood of unnecessary retractions, or were simply ignored.
The Biden administration allowed only two witnesses to testify in the hearing, including Zephranie Buetow, Assistant Secretary of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, and Carlos Uriarte, the Assistant Attorney General overseeing the Department of Justice’s Office of Legislative Affairs.
Both positions are below the top level executive management ranks in the two federal departments, so when Republicans pressed them, for example, to declare “dates-certain” when requested documents would be delivered, Buetow and Uriarte could only plead their inability to speak unilaterally for their departments in response to such requests because of the multiple decision-making channels involved.
Buetow, a former Senate staffer working for Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), was only appointed to her position at DHS in February. Uriarte is a former staffer to Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and has been on his present duties at DOJ for 10 months.
When Cline pressed Buetow to commit to produce un-redacted documents, as the committee had specified in a subpoena, she demurred, saying “with regard to redactions, again, this is a space where the Office of General Counsel works with the Office of Legislative Affairs and other components. We look forward to working with your staff in terms of the accommodations process but I would not say that I am in a position to speak unilaterally to what documents will or won’t be redacted.”
A visibly frustrated Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) summarized the hearing, saying “I still don’t have an answer.”
