With just hours to spare before recess, the powerful House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena the Epstein files from the FBI-DOJ. Though the step doesn’t in any way ensure that the files are produced by Congress, it does make it that much harder for those protecting Donald Trump to continue to do so. The move also operates as a big F-U to Mike Johnson, given that he called the recess in order to get Congress out of town before it did something stupid in the Trump case, something as stupid as subpoenaing the files. From the erstwhile Joe My God:
Democrats on a subcommittee of the powerful House Committee on Oversight made a motion for the subpoena Wednesday afternoon, just hours before the House was scheduled to end its July work session and depart Washington for a month long break.
Three Republicans on the panel voted with Democrats for the subpoena, sending it through on an 8-2 vote tally.
Note the numbers; it seems almost “planned” as a means to get the files with the least amount of political damage possible. The committee of ten, split five and five in party, needed a majority of Republicans to move the subpoena to a vote. It is almost comical to think that two Republicans on the committee were so beholden to Trump that they believed it safe to not even subpoena records on the biggest sex-trafficking case to ever come from this nation, one that the DOJ determined to be unworthy of further investigation and definitely beyond arrests. Stunning. Thank God for Democrats, again.
The Republican subcommittee chairman, Rep. Clay Higgins [photo] of Louisiana, said that work was beginning to draft the subpoena but that it would take some time for both sides to work out the final language.
Well, this is almost planned. Leave the head of the committee as having voted against it in order to work on the language of that same subpoena. The subpoena itself is worth nothing if the language is so loose so as to permit the DOJ to only partially respond. Higgins may do Trump a favor. Congress knows how to subpoena records that it demands and knows exactly what language to use in the cases where it wants them all. The fact that they’re still haggling could be interpreted as a bit of a bad sign, though there is a lot of inside baseball to the matter, so much so that caution is warranted in commenting much further on it.
But one could hold out the opinion that the subpoena will satisfy MAGAs who won’t let this story go. The files will go to Congress. But whether the files will come over in a usable form that determines Trump’s involvement in underage rape is another matter entirely. To be sure, it is a first step in holding the administration accountable, but it just isn’t the last step. We all know that Congressional committees can take forever to release information concerning some files, and there’s no rule that the Committee cannot do the same thing the DOJ did and bury all of them. But it is something, and it is something unexpected – at least to the outside. Perhaps Johnson nodded his head on the way out the jetway, knowing that he couldn’t survive this storm without something happening.
Full and open disclosure is still on DOJ’s plate more so than Congress, though this now puts a lot of heat on both. Surprising. Some of us do a lot of reading about this stuff throughout every day, and this wasn’t on the radar screen. We will see.
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the Republicans voted on other subpoenas such as the Clintons, Joe Biden, Comey, Merrick Garland, and others on the same subcommittee.
Garbage in…garbage out. Anyone who believes the TRUTH will come out must be smoking crack. The shredders are a humming.
Remember Oliver North? At Pearl Harbor PSD, we had giant shredders on the top floor. They had Oliver North’s picture taped to them. Also remember he was the one that screwed up the rescue attempt in Iran way back when our ‘liberal’ press had ‘day such and so of the hostage crisis’ on the news every night.
The press hounded a popular Democratic president, Carter over his dealing with a mess created by a Republican president, resulting in another fascist being elected. Sound familiar?
Until the Republican’s are defunct we will have a fascist country. One of the big reasons I got out of the Navy in 1990 was because I didn’t want to die for a country that had elected as its leader a fascist five times out of the last six elections. If Clinton had not been elected I was going to do what I could to get my family out of this shit hole country. We haven’t done much better since 1990. Out of the last seven elections we have elected a fascist four times.