House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff told reporters on Thursday that the Justice Department has missed the deadline to release special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report and counterintelligence files pertaining to the investigation.
He also said that his panel has scheduled a meeting next week to take an “enforcement action” and force the DOJ to hand over the documents, although he failed short of explaining what that actions would be.
Schiff noted that there was still “some small but vanishing hope” among members of his committee that the Justice Department will decide to comply with the oversight requests, although he voiced concern that the President may have given an all-encompassing order to his administration to continue stonewalling all congressional requests “no matter how reasonable.”
“We gave them a reasonable period of time to produce them and ask them to do so as a demonstration of good faith, and an initial part of what would be a rolling production of documents, the long and the short of it is the deadline came and went without the production of a single document, raising profound questions about whether the department has any intention to honor its legal obligations,” Schiff said.
Last week, the committee’s chairman issued a subpoena for the full Mueller report, underlying evidence and the counterintelligence and foreign intelligence materials generated in the course of the Russia investigation, giving the Justice Department until Wednesday 3 p.m. to do meet their demands.
“We will continue to urge the Department to render that unnecessary but if they don’t demonstrate some good faith, we will be forced to compel them to honor their legal commitments,” Schiff said.
A similar request has been made by the House Judiciary Committee but the DOJ has refused to comply with that subpoena as well, arguing that releasing the unredacted version of the report with its grand jury material would be a violation of the law and could compromise ongoing investigations.
Schiff has stressed that his committee is entitled to the report because its duty is to conduct oversight of the intelligence community.
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