Two months ago, the Justice Department announced that it was launching a formal criminal probe into the scandal surrounding GOP Hill staffers stealing thousands of confidential Dem documents. The DOJ had even appointed a qualified U.S. attorney — David Kelley — to head the investigation. It sounded like this was really going somewhere.
That was two months ago. As Roll Call noted this week, since then, the DOJ has pushed the matter to the back burner.
More than two months after being asked by Senators to undertake a probe of thousands of improperly accessed Democratic memos, the Justice Department has yet to request mounds of evidence that have been assembled by Sergeant-at-Arms Bill Pickle.
At this point, all the evidence compiled by Pickle and his aides – including more than 4,600 memos from computer servers and hard drives, plus reams of testimony from more than 100 Republican and Democratic staffers – remains in Pickle’s possession. Pickle’s office declined to comment on where precisely the evidence is being held.
In addition, no members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, nor their aides, have been contacted by prosecutors in the case. Key figures in the case, including former GOP staffer Manuel Miranda, have not been contacted either.
I know this isn’t exactly life-and-death, but it’s a substantial political controversy in which several Republicans obviously stole confidential information. What’s the hold up?