First, the story from JudicialWatch.com:
Federal Court Orders DOJ to Begin Searching and Producing Fusion GPS Records in Response to Judicial Watch Lawsuit
Court Criticizes DOJ’s FOIA Response
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton instructed the Justice Department to immediately begin producing records about DOJ communications with Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr. Nellie Ohr worked for Clinton campaign vendor Fusion GPS on the anti-Trump Dossier campaign document.
The DOJ didn’t even want to begin a search for six months, following Judicial Watch winning a lawsuit which demanded records. DOJ historically has frittered time away, purposely, on the back end — now they wanted to fritter time away on the front end and then fritter time away on the back end.
Judge Walton rejected a Justice Department request to begin producing documents six months from now and ordered the DOJ to begin producing documents immediately on a rolling basis over the next two months. Judge Walton also rejected DOJ’s efforts to restrict their search to only 2016.
Judge Walton said this on the June 14th hearing. He wasn’t happy.
I think if it’s been almost, since December when the initial request was made more should have been done by now. And it seems to me if you have someone who’s going to come into office and they say they’re going to be a disrupter, that they should appreciate there’s going to be a lot of FOIA requests and therefore, should gear up to deal with those requests. So I’m not real sympathetic to the position that you have limited staff and therefore, you can’t comply with these requests. So I think you’re going to have to get some more people.
That’s called triage. That’s called prioritizing your workload.
The original issue was this:
In December 2017, Bruce Ohr was removed from his position as U.S. Associate Deputy Attorney General after it was revealed that he conducted undisclosed meetings with anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steel and Glenn Simpson, principal of Fusion GPS. A House Intelligence Committee memo released by Chairman Devin Nunes on February 2 noted that Ohr’s wife, Nellie, was “employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump” and that Bruce Ohr passed the results of that research, which was paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign, to the FBI.
Let me conclude with this thought.
Can you tell me any other private agency or business that would be able to somehow get away with deferring immediate reaction or production of documents in terms of response to the loss of a lawsuit? Your business or agency would produce the documents or find yourselves in contempt of the issuing court and then subsequently invaded by law enforcement officers confiscating whatever was demanded by the court itself.
Telling some court that, nah, you know what? We’ll get on that in about half a year?
That just wouldn’t work in the real world.
BZ
