Attorney General Todd Blanche said Thursday the Justice Department has no active criminal investigations into Democratic lawmakers over their plans to scrutinise the Trump administration.
Blanche spoke to reporters after a press conference on Operation TorNado, an international crackdown on dark web drug trafficking that produced 354 arrests worldwide, including 132 in the United States.
“There’s no ongoing investigations, criminal investigations into words that that incoming senators or congressmen have said,” Blanche told reporters. Asked what a Democrat had said that crossed a criminal line, he replied, “I’d never said that that point has been crossed.”
Blanche gave a different signal days earlier. In a CNN interview that aired Sunday, he said “there could be” a crime to investigate if Democrats’ rhetoric turned threatening.
The dispute started after President Donald Trump said on Saturday that Democrats who plan to investigate executive branch officials when they take over Congress in January are “EXTORTIONISTS” worthy of “imprisonment” and said he was ordering the Justice Department to look into it.
One day before Blanche’s remarks, Aaron Reitz, the US attorney for the Southern District of Texas, directed Senator Richard Blumenthal to preserve records from his inquiry into private donors to the White House ballroom. Reitz accused Blumenthal of threatening “citizens for associating themselves with the President” and warned of “significant legal consequences” if he failed to comply.
Representative Robert Garcia, who is in line to chair the House Oversight Committee in January, has warned Trump officials to “lawyer up”. White House counsel Will Scharf wrote to Garcia this week that threats aimed at deterring officials from public service “may cross the line into blatant criminality”.
Democrats won control of Congress in the midterm elections and take over in January. The new majority has said it plans a wave of investigations into the administration.
Source: Washington Examiner
