Four House committee chairs urged Inspector General Michael Horowitz in a seven-page letter Monday to open an emergency review into the recent actions they claim are intended to tilt the scales to benefit President Donald Trump's reelection bid. The lawmakers — who asked Horowitz last month to examine Attorney General William Barr's handling of an investigation into the origins of the FBI's Trump-Russia probe — argued that the decisions aren't in line with the inspector general's June 2018 recommendations to prevent the DOJ from influencing an imminent election.
The recommendations were part of the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General report that reviewed various actions by the FBI in advance of the 2016 election. The report stated that election-related law enforcement and prosecutorial activities should not be carried out within 60 or 90 days of Election Day. But the DOJ "is attempting to do the opposite," wrote House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and House Administration Chair Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.
According to the letter, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania David Freed's Sept. 24 announcement that he's investigating issues with mail-in ballots at the Luzerne County Board of Elections improperly "went into an unusual amount of detail about an ongoing investigation, stating that nine military ballots had been discarded and recovered, and that all had been cast for President Trump."
The four chairs said Barr reportedly briefed Trump on the matter before the DOJ even issued a statement publicly announcing the inquiry's existence. The top House lawmakers said the department's conduct is concerning and may violate several DOJ longstanding policies and practices, including the prohibition of public comments on an ongoing criminal investigation.
"Despite the preliminary nature of the investigation in Luzerne County, President Trump's re-election campaign seized upon the upcoming public announcement of an investigation as a campaign issue," the letter said.
Before Freed's announcement, lawmakers wrote that Trump appeared to reveal the existence of the probe on Fox News saying, "They found six ballots in an office yesterday in a garbage can. … [T]hey had Trump written on it, and they were thrown in a garbage can." Days later, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar confirmed an ongoing probe but said that the discarding of the ballots did not appear to be the result of fraud, the letter said.
Barr and Freed seemed to have acted against a backdrop of worrying broader changes to department policy, the lawmakers wrote, noting a recent email obtained by investigative nonprofit ProPublica that revealed officials in the DOJ's Public Integrity Section lifted a decades-long policy barring federal prosecutors from mounting election fraud investigations in the final months before an election.
The department's Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses handbook for district election officers said prosecutors have to wait before beginning an election fraud probe until after the election in question has concluded, its results certified and all recounts and election contests concluded. The handbook noted that starting a public criminal probe into alleged election fraud before a contest "to which the allegations pertain has been concluded runs the obvious risk of chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities. It also runs the significant risk of interjecting the investigation itself as an issue, both in the campaign and in the adjudication of any ensuing election contest."
But the committee chairs argued in Monday's letter that the DOJ's recent change to this longstanding policy "is intended to permit U.S. Attorneys to take actions that could aid President Trump's re-election campaign, in violation of other longstanding DOJ policy and in a manner that is inconsistent with the Hatch Act," which bars federal employees from using official authority or influence to interfere with or affect the result of an election.
Neither a DOJ spokesperson nor Horowitz's office immediately replied Tuesday evening to requests for comment on the letter.
During a contentious House Judiciary Committee hearing in July, Barr denied allegations that he's boosting the president's bid for a second term and politicizing criminal cases involving Trump allies charged in the 2016 Russian election interference probe, which the attorney general called a "bogus 'Russiagate' scandal. Barr repeatedly characterized himself as a defender of the rule of law to restore order, and he told lawmakers he has "complete freedom to do what I feel is right."
--Editing by Michael Watanabe.
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