House judiciary panel subpoenas memos kept by McCabe at FBI

WASHINGTON — The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee on Thursday subpoenaed the Justice Department for memos written by former FBI acting director Andrew McCabe.

The committee is also demanding documents related to the FBI’s application to monitor the communications of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

And the subpoena came the same day the co-founder of an opposition research firm that hired a former British spy to investigate President Donald Trump’s potential Russia ties declined a private interview for an investigation the committee is jointly carrying out with the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee.

McCabe kept memos of his interactions with Trump and also documented some conversations with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination with Trump associates.

The memos have taken on new relevance following news reports that Rosenstein discussed secretly recording Trump and invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president.

Rep. Robert Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican and chairman of the Judiciary panel, said in a letter Thursday to Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the documents the committee wants are records the Justice Department “has either refused to produce or has continually delayed producing.”

Separately, an attorney for Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm, said in a new letter that his client won’t participate in a probe Goodlatte is leading along with Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, who chairs the oversight committee.

In the letter, attorney Joshua Levy compared the investigation to the “treacherous tactics” Sen. Joseph McCarthy used during his anti-Communist hearings in the 1950s. And Levy wrote the panel “has established a clear record of flouting its own rules of confidentiality and ignoring and abusing the rights of Americans who come before it.”

Simpson has previously sat for three congressional interviews. He has faced heavy public criticism from Republicans for his role in the hiring of Christopher Steele, a former British spy. Steele’s research, funded by Democrats and later compiled into a dossier that became public, was included in court papers used to obtain a secret surveillance warrant to monitor Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

The president and his allies in Congress say the use of the information to monitor Page was an abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process during the early days of the Russia investigation. Democrats and some former intelligence officials have said there is no evidence of abuse of the FISA process.