did not comment on on this, at all. when he gave his speech today on voting rights. the members of congress, who were targeted by trump s doj, say they have been able to get zero information out of the justice department under merrick garland s leadership since this came to light. garland s people won t even tell the targeted members of congress what the legal predicate was for going after them, let alone what type of information, exactly, was collected from them. they won t even tell congress the current-justice department won t even tell congress, right now, if more members of congress were hit. were brought into this thing. expect this to get worse, before it gets better. it is clear that the justice department, under president biden, does not want the job of investigating and rooting around what went rotten inside their own department under the previous president. but even if they don t want that job, that is the job they have, now. the stakes of them getting that
this was until early june that this fight was going on between our legal counsel, david mccraw, in secret with prosecutors at the justice department. this wasn t something that happened into fef weeks into when merrick garland took over. this is something that was going on close to almost the six-month mark of biden being in office. and now the justice department has completely reversed itself and says they don t want they will not do this. is that because they re embarrassed by what happened? why is it that the fight continued under merrick garland for the metadata from my emails? right. and if these were politically motivated and/or otherwise
improper actions by the justice department, not only why did they continue after the change in administration, but even if they hadn t continued after the change in administration, what s the recourse within the justice department to find out the extent of this, to punish the people who did it, or at least to investigate them to figure out what exactly they did and to deter this from happening again. that s becoming a larger and larger question every day in the merrick garland era of the justice department the more we learn about what s been happening. new york times reporter michael schmidt. i know this is a breaking story just posted. thanks for helping us understand it. thanks for having me. all right. i want to bring into the conversation now one of the subjects of this story, one of apparently two, we believe, democrats on the house intelligence committee who had his records seized. now chairman of the house intelligence committee, congressman adam schiff.
is a lot of people it was spam. and we may learn more now that the story has come out about others who similarly got these notices as they go back and they check their old email to see whether they got a notice like this as well. so we may learn more. i would certainly like to know, and we ve asked the justice department, and they ve not been forthcoming, whether this was just directed at democrats or whether this was a committee-wide investigation. i wouldn t be surprised if this was a purely partisan investigation, really targeting one party. but there s a lot we still don t know, and i imagine we ll find out more. and while on that point, though, are you going to find out more? it would seem to me that merrick garland, as the new attorney general, inherited not just the awesome responsibilities of being attorney general of the united states but a whole extra awesome responsibility that nobody s had to deal with since,
you know, the era of nixon and john mitchell perhaps at the justice department, which is that there s all this stuff that happened in the justice department, including people including with the involvement of people who are still there. that is a profound departure from previous norms. in many cases, that is a profound and shocking violation of justice department policy. everything from, you know, intervention in criminal cases involving the president s friends to the way that reporters were apparently surveilled, and now what you re describing here. in terms of getting to the bottom of this, do you expect merrick garland to publicly testify about this, to make justice department officials who were involved in this testify? do you want congress to exercise its oversight responsibilities here, or do you want this just handled quietly by the inspector general on the i.g. s own terms?