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WASHINGTON – The House Judiciary Committee reached an agreement with Don McGahn, former White House counsel for President Donald Trump, to testify before lawmakers – a resolution in the long-running legal case that represented a constitutional clash between the legislative and executive branches.
The committee sought McGahn’s testimony in May 2019 because he was a key figure in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. McGahn described several episodes of possible obstruction by Trump as he sought to remove Mueller or curb his probe.
But McGahn defied the subpoena. The head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Engel, told then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone that McGahn and other advisers to the president cannot be compelled to testify.
Closing Thought–11May21
Finally Trump’s lawyer at the DOJ, AG Bill Barr has been called out by a couple of judges for his part in the obfuscating of the investigation conducted by Mueller…..
A federal judge has ordered the release of a legal memorandum the Trump-era Justice Department prepared for then-Attorney General William Barr before he announced his conclusion that then-President Trump had not obstructed justice during the Russia investigation, the AP reports. The Justice Department had refused to give the March 24, 2019, memorandum to a government transparency group that requested it under the Freedom of Information Act, saying the document represented the private advice of lawyers and was produced before any formal decision had been made and was therefore exempt from disclosure under public records law. But US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in a sharp rebuke of Barr, said the Justice Department had obscured “the true purpose of the memorandum” when it withheld
Hill article, headlined DOJ faces big decision on home confinement, provide an effective accounting of the building discussion around the status of home confinement in the federal system as it appears the pandemic is winding down. I recommend the full piece, and here are excerpts:
The Biden administration will soon have to decide whether to send back to prison thousands of inmates who were transferred to home confinement after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have been facing mounting calls to rescind a policy implemented in the final days of the Trump administration that would revoke home confinement for those inmates as soon as the government lifts its emergency declaration over the coronavirus.
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Joe Biden has inherited a department plagued by scandal, just as Gerald Ford did in 1974.
Law professor at Fordham UniversityThe Atlantic
President Joe Biden is facing problems Gerald Ford would have appreciated. Like Ford in 1974, Biden has come into office following a president accused of criminality. Both Biden and Ford inherited a Department of Justice plagued by scandal and well-grounded charges of politicization. Both had to choose a nominee for attorney general knowing that recent occupants of that office contributed to partisanship and displayed a lack of integrity. And both took office while questions lingered about recent leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a component of the DOJ.
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Brian Miller reflects on a year of coronavirus oversight.
Coming up on the one-year anniversary of his confirmation, Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery Brian Miller is reflecting on the challenges and successes his office has experienced in overseeing relief programs for the novel coronavirus and resulting economic recession.
“We ve had people challenge our jurisdiction. We ve had people trying to slow us down in various ways,” Miller said in an interview with
Government Executive. “We ve come through that in the last year, I think, in a very successful way, in a very surprising way. In some ways, this office was almost set up to fail and yet we re succeeding and accomplishing the job.”