FBI Ignores Court Order, Congressional Oversight; Refuses To Respond To Questions About Clinton Emails

Failures

from the no-one-makes-the-FBI-do-ANYTHING.-got-it? dept

Well, it appears some Senate committee heads are getting a little taste of what it feels like to be Just Another Citizen. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is irritated the FBI won’t apprise him of the latest developments in the Hillary Clinton email debacle.

Grassley, whose panel oversees the FBI, reacted sharply to a letter the FBI sent Monday turning aside U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan’s request for information on whether investigators have been able to retrieve records from a backup thumb drive of Clinton emails or from a server turned over by a tech company Clinton hired.

“The FBI is behaving like it’s above the law,” Grassley said in a statement provided to POLITICO on Monday evening. “Simply refusing to cooperate with a court-ordered request is not an appropriate course of action. This entire case, from Secretary Clinton’s ill-advised decision to use a non-government email server, to the FBI’s investigation about classified information, needs some transparency in order to assure the American people that getting to the bottom of this controversy is a priority.”

Grassley is right about most of this. The FBI does tend to believe it’s above the law, what with its warrantless surveillance, refusal to cooperate with DOJ oversight and its general indifference to its own internal policies. But what Grassley is complaining about is standard operating procedure by the agency. When not withholding information for bogus reasons, the agency quite frequently cites “ongoing investigations” when refusing to turn over documents.

Here’s FBI general counsel James Baker’s response to the court’s request for a status update in the ongoing FOIA lawsuit:

“At this time, consistent with long-standing Department of Justice and FBI policy, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing investigation, nor are we in a position to provide additional information at this time,” Baker wrote to senior State Department attorney Mary McLeod.

The fun thing about investigations (and this goes for local law enforcement just as much as it does for the FBI) is that they can be started at any time, run indefinitely and agencies are under no obligation to inform anyone when investigations are completed, abandoned, etc. That’s up to the public (and senators and, apparently, even the State Department) to suss out via FOIA requests, court orders or shouty statements delivered to journalists.

Yes, the FBI is likely doing a bit of stonewalling, but as long as it has an open investigative file and someone drops something into it occasionally over the next indeterminate number of years, it will never need to turn over relevant documents. Certainly Grassley and his committee will be able to bring more pressure to bear than the average FOIA requester, but for the immediate future, the senator will have to deal with the FBI’s auto-response brushoff.

Once this gets squared away, the senator may want to take a look at the specifics of our FOIA law, especially where it intersects with law enforcement’s many exemptions and other FOIA escape hatches. That’s where some work needs to be done. There’s an FOIA Improvements Act bill that hasn’t gone anywhere since February of this year that could be put back into play. Grassley was the last one who touched it, so he should know exactly where it is.

It’s certainly frustrating that the FBI has so many ways of saying, “No.” The agency is incredibly adept when it comes to refusals. As it has demonstrated multiple times in the past, it can still say “No” even while saying “Yes.” It’s a systemic problem that places the public’s right to know far below these agencies’ desire to keep as much information as possible to themselves.

Filed Under: chuck grassley, court order, emails, fbi, hillary clinton