Alliance for Justice Urges Senate Judiciary Committee to Insist The Department of Justice Cooperates With Congressional Oversight

Statement of Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron

December 19, 2007, Washington DC—Alliance for Justice urges the Senate Judiciary Committee at its hearing today on the nomination of Mark Filip to be Deputy Attorney General, the second highest official in the Department of Justice, to question how he plans to end the Department’s intolerable track-record of resisting Congressional oversight, including the Department’s troubling response to calls for an external investigation into the destruction of video recordings made during CIA interrogations of detainees. 

In recent weeks, the Department of Justice has revealed that not much has changed since Attorney General Michael Mukasey replaced Alberto Gonzales. The Department’s response to the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes is a prime example of why the Senate Judiciary Committee must insist that the Department respect Congress’s role in monitoring the executive branch. Not only is the Department resisting an inquiry into the CIA destruction of tapes by Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr., of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, but it is also misleading that federal court by claiming that one reason for the court not to pursue its own inquiry is that “[i]n light of the current inquiries by the political branches into the destruction of the tapes . . . it would not be appropriate to institute a judicial inquiry.”  At the same time, the Department has asked Congress – one of the two “political branches” whose inquiries it has put forward to the court as a reason not to investigate – to refrain from any investigation into the destruction of the tapes.  

Alliance for Justice is deeply troubled both by the Department’s opposition to Congressional oversight of the CIA – memorialized in Attorney General Mukasey’s December 14, 2007 letter to the Chair and Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee. We are also disturbed by the Department’s ethically dubious attempt to play Congress and the federal district court against each other in its court filings.  Before Mukasey was confirmed as Attorney General, he assured the Committee that he would cooperate with its oversight role.  Before the Committee decides whether to send Judge Filip’s nomination to the floor of the Senate, it should receive his personal assurance that the Department’s duplicitous actions, which reek of an administration once again trying to conceal its misdeeds, will cease immediately, and that Congress and the federal court will have the full cooperation of the Department in their investigations of the CIA’s destruction of evidence.