House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform members expressed intense frustration — and at times, outright fury — with executive branch officials who have withheld documents the panel asked for months ago.
Most of the panel members’ anger takes root with these examples:
- The Department of Justice hasn’t handed over the case file on its now-closed investigation of the illegal targeting of conservative and Tea Party non-profit applicants by the IRS during 2010 and 2012 campaigns.
- The Department of Homeland Security refuses to turn over documents indicating how many foreigners are overstaying their visas to be in the U.S.
- The Office of Personnel Management has only delivered heavily redacted documents about the massive data breach that compromised personal information about 22.1 million current, former and retired federal employees.
Committee Chairman Rep. [crscore]Jason Chaffetz[/crscore] wasn’t about to let agency leadership get away with non-answers during a hearing Thursday on those agencies’ failure to heed the panel’s document requests over the last year.
“Why aren’t you giving this information, the same stuff that was already hacked?” Chaffetz fumed at Jason Levine, director of OPM’s congressional relations office. “We know that the adversary has it, but you won’t let us see it,” he said, waving documents almost entirely obscured by black ink.
“You won’t even (show the documents) in camera — you still redact it,” Chaffetz added, saying Congress had been requesting the documents for “months. So don’t tell us that you’re responsive and happy. We’re not happy.”
Chaffetz called the OPM data breach one of the “biggest aberrations” in America’s history.
[crscore] Rep. Elijah Cummings[/crscore], the committee’s top Democrat, from Maryland, was also critical of OPM.
“It seems like we’re going in a circle,” he told Levine.
Chaffetz at another point during the hearing called Tamara Fucile, the Office of Management and Budget’s associate director for legislative affairs, “infuriating” when she refused to say when committee members will get documents they’ve been requesting since March 2015 about the Waters of the United States rule.
Other House Oversight members expressed similar dissatisfaction with DOJ on documents from its completed investigation of the IRS. Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik cited law enforcement exceptions to justify withholding the documents. Kadzik also refused to say if Justice Department investigators interviewed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.
Ohio Republican Rep. [crscore]Jim Jordan[/crscore] wasn’t satisfied with that.
“But you can give us something. You haven’t given us anything. That’s the point,” Jordan said.
Rep. [crscore]Mark Meadows[/crscore] has been asking the DHS since March of 2015 for DHS documents on foreigners here with expired visas. The North Carolina Republican gave DHS Assistant Secretary Tia Johnson seven days to deliver the requested documents.
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