Last week, the House Intelligence Committee sent a letter to deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein threatening to take action to enforce a subpoena it had issued for the FBI memo that kicked off the initial counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. The issue is that both the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees had requested access to the document. The FBI and Justice had delivered it in heavily redacted format.

2018_04_04_12_39_29 by Fox News on Scribd

This is pretty critical. The focus of the House Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee is now on how the Trump dossier prepared by a Fusion GPS subcontractor was used as a weapon against the Trump campaign and administration.

Friday, Justice and the FBI agreed to comply with the subpoena.

DOJ Letter to Nunes – FISA Title One Application Approval 4-6-18-Boyd-Letter-To-Nunes by The Conservative Treehouse on Scribd

Politico and the #Resistance are portraying this as a loss for Nunes because an unredacted copy is not going to be released to Congress:

The Department of Justice on Friday dismissed Rep. Devin Nunes demand for an unredacted copy of the document that initiated the FBI’s investigation of links between Russia and President Donald Trump’s campaign.

In a letter released Friday, the Justice Department reaffirmed their and the FBI’s response to House Intelligence Committees inquiries regarding the document.

Nunes, who is the House Intelligence Committee chairman, on Thursday sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding an unredacted copy of that document.

The Justice Department, however, have said they accommodated the committee in a “manner consistent with relevant legal precedents“ by providing members of the department and FBI to review the FISA applications and renewals in camera.

But the actual issue was allowing all members of the committees to see the warrant application in an unredacted form, and that is exactly what is being allowed.

The Department of Justice says it will allow members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to view surveillance warrants granted against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in what the agency is calling an “extraordinary accommodation.”

DOJ is allowing the access to the four warrant applications in response to demands from California Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

One of my greatest disappointments with Jeff Sessions and the team he has installed at Justice is that they are obviously much more concerned with preserving prerogatives of the Justice Department rather than rooting out the endemic corruption of the past eight years. To date, no one has been held to account for the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. No one has been held to account for the weaponization of the IRS. No one has looked at the role the Justice Department had in fomenting civil unrest in conjunction with the #BlackLivesMatter movement. And on and on. Whenver Congress attempts to exercise oversight, Justice falls back on the “if I told you I’d have to kill you” rationale that all failing parts of the law enforcement and intelligence communities use to protect themselves. It really has to end.