Biden administration stonewalls Congress on nearly all fronts
Sarah Westwood
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Three months into the new Congress, House Republicans have followed through on their pledge to investigate a wide range of Biden administration actions from the previous two years.
Biden administration officials, however, have so far refused to cooperate on virtually every front.
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It’s a far cry from the sense of transparency and openness President Joe Biden promised to restore upon taking office.
Instead, GOP lawmakers face the increasingly likely prospect of a protracted fight to get basic answers.
More than a half-dozen House committees have sent dozens of requests to agencies across the federal government since January, probing everything from Hunter Biden’s business dealings to the expedited push for COVID-19 booster approval.
Even several Democratic-controlled Senate committees have pushed the Biden administration for information — and, in some cases, expressed frustration with the result.
Biden administration officials have, to date, met some of the letters with silence.
In other cases, they have offered only a perfunctory response without addressing the substance of the requests.
The House Oversight Committee, for example, asked the White House counsel on Jan. 10 to provide detailed information about the discovery of classified documents inside Joe Biden’s private office, including the documents themselves, a list of all the people authorized to enter that office, and all communications between the White House and the National Archives and Records Administration about the situation.
White House counsel Stuart Delery responded with a letter saying only that his office would review “legitimate oversight interests” and potentially offer details sometime in the future. The White House has not provided any documents beyond that, a person familiar with the situation said.
The National Archives said in response to requests for information from the House Oversight Committee about its handling of the Biden and Trump classified document cases that it could not respond to most congressional document requests about the situation unless it got sign-off from the Justice Department, effectively offering the more powerful agency veto power over its cooperation.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee has blasted the State Department for failing to provide all but the most basic information about the administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) wrote in a letter to the State Department earlier this month that many weeks of requesting records have been inexplicably fruitless for his committee.
“The paucity of documents produced by the State Department to date comes despite the Committee having repeatedly requested that the Department begin identifying responsive documents and information following the November 2022 election,” McCaul wrote.
All the State Department did hand over, McCaul noted, was a copy of a public report and heavily redacted pages that were even less useful.
“Most of the remaining pages included extensive redactions that severely limit their usability and value. Notably, many of the redactions appear to cover the prepared answers from the question-and-answer portion of talking points documents,” McCaul noted. “That is to say, the Department redacted information from Congress that it was prepared to share with the public at the time the documents were generated.”
In only limited circumstances have federal officials cooperated with Republicans. Even then, however, the Biden administration has put significant restrictions on just how far that cooperation can go.
The House Oversight Committee announced on Thursday that its investigators had discovered that members of the Biden family received more than $1 million in payments linked to a Chinese company. The panel’s discovery came after the Treasury Department relented following months of stonewalling and allowed the committee to review financial documents, known as suspicious activity reports, related to the Bidens.
The decision also only came when the committee pushed to hold a hearing, or at least a closed-door interview, with a top Treasury Department official over the financial dealings in question.
“After two months of dragging their feet, the Treasury Department is finally providing us with access to the suspicious activity reports for the Biden family and their associates’ business transactions,” House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said in a statement this week. “It should never have taken us threatening to hold a hearing and conduct a transcribed interview with an official under the penalty of perjury for Treasury to finally accommodate part of our request.”
“For over 20 years, Congress had access to these reports but the Biden Administration changed the rules out of the blue to restrict our ability to conduct oversight,” Comer added.
The Oversight Committee was granted only an “in camera” review, meaning lawmakers and staff were not permitted to take copies of the documents with them out of a designated room in which they were allowed to read them.
The National Archives allowed its general counsel to sit for a transcribed interview with the Oversight Committee in late January, but the lawyer, Gary Stern, was not permitted to answer many questions at the heart of the committee’s inquiry.
Oversight Republicans want to know why the National Archives seemingly responded with more public aggression to the Trump classified document situation than to the Biden case.
Stern told the Oversight Committee in January that the archives had drafted a public statement after news of Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents came to light, but the statement did not get published.
Stern said someone outside his agency instructed the National Archives not to publish the statement, declining to specify who.
“According to the [Justice Department] guidance, I’m not supposed to talk about the, you know, content of our communications with other parties,” Stern said, according to an excerpt of the transcript Comer released in a letter earlier this month.
Overall, the Biden administration has largely attempted to avoid investigations at various stages of progress related to the origins of COVID-19, alleged misconduct at the FBI and the National Institutes of Health, communications between the federal government and major social media corporations, and other investigations.
Some House Republicans have already moved to a more confrontational approach.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed leaders at the Justice Department, FBI, and Department of Education last month after months of silence from administration officials over law enforcement’s treatment of parents who protested at school board meetings starting in 2021.
Jordan said Republicans began requesting information about the treatment of parents when they were in the House minority; his committee gained subpoena power when Republicans won a House majority in the 2022 midterm elections.
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Frustration with the Biden administration’s refusal to cooperate has even bubbled over in the Democratic Senate.
Both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have complained that the intelligence community continues to block access to the content of the classified documents discovered at both former President Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s private homes despite repeated efforts from the committee to work out some kind of deal with the Biden administration.