POLITICS 06/09/2017 01:27 pm ET

GOP Senator Slams DOJ Legal Opinion As ‘Nonsense’ That ‘Floods The Swamp’

Charles Grassley’s letter is another sign of Republicans’ growing
frustration with Trump.

By Christina Wilkie , Ryan J. Reilly

WASHINGTON ― Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a scathing letter this week to President Donald Trump, arguing that the Office of Legal Counsel is “flooding the swamp.”

“You are being ill-served and ill-advised,” the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman wrote, adding that the Department of Justice office had “utterly failed to live up to its own standards.”

Grassley’s letter was prompted by a May 1 memo from the OLC to other federal agencies, instructing them to effectively ignore any requests from Congress that do not come from chairs of committees or subcommittees. Requests from other individual members of Congress “do not trigger any obligation to accommodate congressional needs and are not legally enforceable,” the memo stated. (Since both houses of Congress are currently controlled by the GOP, that means don’t answer any questions from Democrats as well as most Republicans.)

The memo, signed by acting Assistant Attorney General Curtis Gannon, claimed that it was a “longstanding policy” for government agencies to accommodate “congressional requests for information only when those requests come from a committee, subcommittee, or chairman authorized to conduct oversight.”

“This is nonsense,” Grassley wrote. “For OLC to so fundamentally misunderstand and misstate such a simple fact exposes its shocking lack of professionalism and objectivity,” he told the president.

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