Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) just wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland that you can inject right into my veins. This is the kind of thing that Congress has to do: follow up on and then hold these characters in the Biden Administration to account.

Cotton wrote a letter to Merrick Garland, demanding answers as to the raids on Project Veritas by the FBI by Friday and he makes some killer points about this whole craziness.

https://mobile.twitter.com/pnjaban/status/1460394997551800325

The Department of Justice follows rules and regulations when investigating members of the news media. The regulations state the Department of Justice “views the use of certain law enforcement tools, including . . . search warrants to seek information from, or records of, non-consenting members of the news media as extraordinary measures, not standard investigatory practices.”

Given the execution of these search warrants were not “standard investigatory practices,” I have concerns about the origins of this investigation, the motivations of the investigations, and tactics used by your Department.

So why, when they could have just asked for the information, did the FBI go this route when it is not normal with journalists and Garland has previously spoken out against such compulsory process?

Then the DOJ is trying to justify these raids as being in response to Ashley Biden’s stolen diary. The question for many has been: What legal justification are they using for taking such federal action in going after Project Veritas for being journalists who received the diary?

First, it wasn’t stolen, it was abandoned, according to James O’Keefe. It was left behind by Ashley Biden at a rehab facility. But even if it were stolen, such a thing would normally be considered a state crime. How does this justify federal action?

Cotton notes that the filings in the case use the National Stolen Property Act, trying to argue that the diary was taken across state lines. That’s why they’re calling it “stolen” rather than abandoned, to shoehorn it into the NSPA to justify their actions.

Cotton scoffs at that justification, asking Garland to provide the instances where they have ever done anything like this before for such a thing as a diary, and when they have done this for abandoned property. He also notes that one of the requirements for the act to apply is that the property be worth $5,000. He wants to know how they assessed the diary to be worth that?

Then Cotton really went to town demanding to know about all the contacts they had with The New York Times, given the leaks of information that they had immediately after the raids, as well as anything the FBI has done to investigate the leaks.

Finally, Cotton went for the brass ring.

4. Please provide all communications between officials from the Department of Justice and the White House concerning the investigation into the disappearance of Ashley Biden’s diary. Did anyone at the White House have advance notice of the search warrants for the cellphones of journalists affiliated with Project Veritas?

Will we find some backdoor communication with the White House as we did in regard to the NSBA letter that was a pretense to justify federal action by Garland? Who wants to lay down bets?

This is a fabulous letter from Cotton and it shows he gets it — in spades. But this has to be followed up by action to unspool the machinations here, punish them, and stop them from doing this again. We need to fill the House and the Senate with people willing to take action so that we can ensure against such banana republic actions from the Biden and the Democrats.