Sen. Ron Johnson, leading Senate oversight in the new majority, anticipates more transparency under the Trump administration—but still expects challenges from the same bureaucrats that stonewalled his information requests during the Biden administration.
Johnson, R-Wis., is the chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, part of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Will we get all the information we requested? I don’t know. My assumption is the shredders, the BleachBit programs are in high gear,” Johnson told The Daily Signal. “I suggested early on after President [Donald] Trump’s election that he ought to appoint somebody called a secretary of information extraction. The deep state does not give up its secrets easily, no matter who’s in charge.”
The entrenched bureaucracy battle against transparency is another reason to promptly confirm Trump’s Cabinet choices, Johnson said.
“It’s one of the reasons why we need to get his nominees confirmed quickly, the sub-Cabinet posts confirmed quickly,” Johnson said. “He’s put acting administrators in place. He did that very swiftly because President Trump in his first term, he wasn’t a seasoned politician. … He came in far more trusting of the administration, that people would respect the fact that he won the election. He was now president. He’s commander in chief. The permanent bureaucracy, they don’t, they just look at any president, and the attitude is that this, too, shall pass.”
Johnson wrote about 60 oversight letters as a ranking member of the subcommittee to the Department of Health and Human Services and subagencies regarding what he called the government’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The lack of transparency from the agencies has been jaw-dropping,” Johnson added. “We’re going to focus on that. I’ve got a pent-up demand for information that belongs to the American public that they have every right to see, things like the analysis of the vaccine-injury surveillance systems.”
He noted that after several years, committee members gained access to about 50 pages of redacted emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, after initially requesting several thousand pages.
“The redacted emails were incriminating enough. Who knows who’s in those last 50 pages, so that there will be an early target of subpoenas,” Johnson said.
On his way out, President Joe Biden granted a pardon to Fauci, who some members of Congress think played a potential role in directing U.S. tax dollars to pay for gain-of-function virus research in a Chinese laboratory. The term “gain of function” describes a risky process of making a pathogen more dangerous or contagious for the purpose of studying a response.
Fauci has previously denied that such federal funding occurred for the Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, he accepted the Biden pardon.
A presidential pardon would likely prevent someone from invoking a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for testimony. However, the Wisconsin senator said, the first order of business will be to obtain documents before calling Fauci to testify.
“First, we have to get the documents. I mean, what you don’t want to do is just call somebody in for an interview before they have the documentation to base your questions on. You don’t want to call people in for a hearing until you’ve probably done a transcribed interview,” Johnson said.
Fred Lucas is chief news correspondent and manager of the Investigative Reporting Project for The Daily Signal. He is the author of “The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections.”
Reproduced with permission. Original here: Trump Cabinet Must Force Deep State Transparency, Senator Says
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