Republican Sen. Ron Johnson said Tuesday he subpoenaed the FBI and its director Christopher Wray because he "ran out of patience" after the FBI continued to slow-walk his committee's requests for documents dating back several years.
"My committee granted me the subpoena authorization to try to get everybody's voluntary compliance, but it hasn't worked," the Wisconsin Republican said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "I sent a summary request to Attorney General [William] Barr who has been great. The hang-up is within the FBI."
Johnson's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is just one of several GOP-led Senate panels looking into the FBI's investigation of ties between President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia.
"Back in September of 2019 we were basically relisting all the requests we had for information and we really haven't gotten squat," Johnson said. "What we're seeing now are dribs and drabs."
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., released a document Sunday that should shock people, said Johnson, noting that a year after the FBI was made aware that the Christopher Steele dossier on Trump was "full of Russian disinformation," its agents still came before committees and briefed them falsely on it.
"The FBI has to come clean and they have to produce documents now based on our subpoena by Aug. 20," said Johnson. "I'm done fooling around. Hopefully, we'll be able to engage counsel in the White House as well as the attorney general's office to extract the documents out of the FBI. This is ridiculous."
Johnson added that former FBI Director James Comey has an "awful lot to account for," and he hopes for testimony from him as well.
"He has been pretty slippery," said Comey. "He was interviewed earlier and refused to re-up his classification so he couldn't answer certain questions. James Comey is no white knight here. He has a lot of culpability in terms of what happened. Think of the political nightmare we've gone through over the last three years because of the actions of these individuals. This is again something that needs to be exposed. The public needs to know what happened and people need to be held accountable."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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