US: Republicans Preparing Broad Inquiry into FBI, Security Agencies

By Staff, Agencies

Newly empowered House Republicans are preparing a wide-ranging investigation into law enforcement and national security agencies, raising the prospect of politically charged fights with the Biden administration over access to sensitive information like highly classified intelligence and the details of continuing criminal inquiries by the Justice Department.

The House plans to vote this week on a resolution to create a special Judiciary subcommittee on what it calls the “weaponization of the federal government,” a topic that Republicans have signaled could include reviewing investigations into former President Donald J. Trump.

The panel would be overseen by Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who is also poised to become the Judiciary Committee’s chairman. It remains to be seen who else Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who made numerous concessions to a far-right faction of his party to win the speakership, will put on it.

In a Fox News interview on Friday evening, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a lead negotiator for hard-right lawmakers who pushed Mr. McCarthy’s team for concessions, portrayed the panel as part of the agreement they struck for their support. He said Mr. McCarthy had committed to giving the subcommittee at least as much funding and staffing as the House special committee in the last Congress that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

 “So, we got more resources, more specificity, more power to go after this recalcitrant Biden administration,” Roy said. “That’s really important.”

A spokesman for Jordan did not reply to a request for comment, but both he and Mr. McCarthy have spoken for months about their desire for such an investigation and pledged to voters during the 2022 campaign to carry one out.

“We will hold the swamp accountable, from the withdrawal of Afghanistan, to the origins of COVID and to the weaponization of the FBI.,” McCarthy said in his first remarks as speaker early Saturday. “Let me be very clear: We will use the power of the purse and the power of the subpoena to get the job done.”

The text of the resolution establishing the subcommittee would give the panel essentially open-ended jurisdiction to scrutinize any issue related to civil liberties or to examine how any agency of the federal government has collected, analyzed and used information about Americans – including “ongoing criminal investigations.”

Republicans are promoting Jordan’s panel as a new “Church Committee,” referring to a 1970s investigation by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, that uncovered decades of intelligence and civil liberties abuses by presidents of both parties.

But in an environment in which Trump has been the subject of multiple criminal investigations for years – including continuing inquiries into his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and his hoarding of sensitive documents – Democrats predicted the new investigative subcommittee was likely to adopt a more partisan edge.