(Headline USA) The House Judiciary Committee filed a lawsuit Thursday against two Justice Department officials who reportedly refused to comply with subpoenas for testimony in Republicans’ impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.
The suit asked the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to issue a preliminary injunction compelling Mark Daly and Jack Morgan, both lawyers for the DOJ’s tax division, to sit for depositions with the committee, according to the New York Post.
“The Committee’s need for Daly’s and Morgan’s testimony was urgent,” the motion for the emergency order said. “Every day that they defy the Committee’s Subpoenas delays and hinders its investigation at a time when the Committee is seeking to conclude its fact gathering.”
Daly and Morgan were assigned to the Justice Department’s probe into Hunter Biden’s finances, which, thus far, has resulted in 12 charges against Hunter Biden.
According to IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, Daly and Morgan were involved in a June 2022 meeting with now-special counsel David Weiss, during which the DOJ’s tax division recommended against prosecuting Hunter Biden for tax crimes.
Shapley testified that Morgan even pressed Weiss to “remove Hunter Biden’s name from electronic search warrants.”
The House Judiciary Committee accused the Justice Department of deliberately stonewalling lawmakers’ efforts to interview the two tax division officials.
“At first, DOJ refused to make Daly and Morgan available for voluntary interviews with the Committee, forcing the Committee to subpoena them for depositions, twice,” the court filing said. “But they defied the subpoenas because they elected to comply with DOJ’s baseless and unlawful direction not to appear.”
The DOJ then claimed that the committees were “invalid,” according to the committee’s lawsuit. “Among other things, DOJ argues that the inability of agency counsel to attend supposedly interferes with the President’s ability to control the disclosure of potentially privileged information.”
But as the committee noted, the very nature of the impeachment inquiry is to determine whether President Joe Biden inappropriately interfered with the DOJ’s investigation of his son.
