House hearings on the raid
House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner said Tuesday he will summon Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and
FBI Director Robert Mueller before his panel to explain their decision to raid a lawmaker’s office for the first time in history.
“I want to have Attorney General Gonzales and FBI Director Mueller up here to tell us how they reached the conclusion they did,” said Sensenbrenner, one of
President Bush’s most loyal House allies. Sensenbrenner’s hearings, which began Tuesday, are examining whether the May 20 raid violated the Constitution.
From the AG:
For his part, Gonzales has said that the search of Jefferson’s offices was legal and necessary because the Louisiana Democrat had not cooperated with investigators’ other efforts to gain access to evidence. An affidavit on which the search warrant was based said investigators had found $90,000 stashed in the freezer of Jefferson’s house.
And kudos to Reid and Frist:
Across the Capitol meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., joined his Democratic counterpart, Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, over the weekend in declining to criticize the FBI for the raid. Frist said he does not believe the law enforcement agency violated the separation of powers.
May 31st, 2006 at 7:50 am
Maybe I don’t get it. If the FBI as part of the Executive branch, is not allowed to serve warrants on the Legislative branch, what makes Congress think they can subpeona the Executive branch.
Perhaps the FBI should call their subpeona unConstitutional and give them the finger.
May 31st, 2006 at 8:33 am
Wait, if there’s this “seperation of powers” that Sensenbrenner is screaming about….
How is he going to “summon” anybody?
Jeff Cooper, in his G&A column once remarked something on the order of: “Ask people what characteristics a leader should have, and most will list intelligence, honor, duty, or other notable sentiments. But how do we pick them? Popularity.”
May 31st, 2006 at 9:30 am
…summon Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and…
Two commenters beat me to this point.
May 31st, 2006 at 2:35 pm
There is a difference between subpoenas and search warrants – but the Congressman in question had been ignoring a subpoena for six months. IANAL, but the Constitutional argument is that the Constitution does give congressmen and senators limited immunity from criminal action while Congress is in session (apparently some English king tried influencing the vote in Parliament by arresting members on the other side, once), and a broader immunity speech in Congress. The latter clause is generally taken as protecting papers related to issues before Congress. It would NOT protect the items related to bribery that were subpoenaed and eventually hauled away under the search warrant, but to find those items someone must have riffled through all the other papers. Even though the DOJ took extraordinary measures to ensure that only the proper items were seized, and that the bribery investigators won’t see anything else, still someone from the executive branch might have seen things they shouldn’t have…
I can see a lawyer making this argument, although it’s apt to falter in court on the grounds of the ignored subpoenas. For politicians who have repeatedly endorsed raids where the government breaks down private citizens’ doors in the middle of night and hauls away EVERYTHING, just because this very polite and limited search and seizure was aimed at one of themselves, is a definite sign that they need to become private citizens by January 2007…