House Judiciary Requests Documents From 81 People And Entities, ‘Cause There’s No Harm In Asking, I Guess?

There is a world where both Democrats and Republicans work together to conduct a reasonable investigation about a massive international conspiracy to influence an American election. There’s a world in which they work tirelessly to impeach or otherwise hold accountable the government officials who participated in that scheme.

That is not the world we live in.

Instead, we live on this plane of torment that can’t burn to the ground fast enough. Republicans spent two years in power trying to obstruct any serious investigation into Trump’s activities. Now the Democrats are in charge and a real investigation is taking place. But stupidity can still not be avoided.

The House Judiciary Committee released a list of 81 people and entities that it would like to see documents from. The request is overbroad, and I think I’m being a biased hack who is too charitable towards the Democrats by merely calling it “overbroad.”

Here are some of the people House Judiciary would like to just… turn over papers because they were asked:

* Jay Sekulow — Trump’s personal attorney.
* Julian Assange — currently living in exile.
* Don McGahn — Former White House Counsel
* Federal Bureau of Investigation — Sure, why not?
* Michael Cohen — I think we’ve covered this?
* General Services Administration — GTFO of my face with this

House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler suggested that these requests would be backed up by subpoenas if the documents are not voluntarily handed over. I think he means to say: “subpoenas, which will in some cases be fought tooth and nail for years or until the Sun swallows the Earth whole.”

Nadler is entirely too smart to think that this list is actually a thing. Some of the people on the list have entirely reasonable privilege arguments to make. Like, ALL the privileges: attorney-client, executive, work-product, investigative privilege — to the extent that’s a thing. Even people with bad privilege arguments are certainly invited to make them, if they are ever even served with a subpoena.

You can see the full list of requests here. I, too, would like to see documents from all these people. While we’re at it, I’d also like to see what the FBI has on who killed Biggie and Tupac. But the notion that all these people or entities, or even most of them, will just hand over documents willingly is foolish.

Nadler knows all this. The television says that House Judiciary started with a list of 150 people and had to whittle it down, and I have to believe that Nadler was one of the guys in the room trying to explain to his colleagues why putting some of the people on this list is dumb. It’s a flashy list, and it puts Trump on notice, to the extent he wasn’t already, the the House is coming for his entire allegedly criminal enterprise. I’m sure that’s what some Democrats wanted to do.

I’m just not sure the list of 81 people and entities even counts as “news.” It’s more like writing down your list of three wishes just in case a Genie ever pops out of your thermos.

Let’s keep our eyes on the ball. The next shoes to drop need to be Trump Org. CFO Allen Weisselberg and Trump secretary Rhona Graff. They need to establish further basis for investigating the Trump children and Jared Kushner. Those people are on the list (except for Ivanka, weirdly) and we should focus on them. An open-ended document request from “Department of Justice” (I’m not making that up) is just NOT a serious step towards exposing the truth.

House Judiciary Committee launches sweeping Trump probe [Axios]

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.