In a statement Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland expressed concern about prosecutors’ demands for legislators’ information and acknowledged the sensitive issues raised by such probes into the legislative branch.
“There are important questions that must be resolved in connection with an effort by the department to obtain records related to Members of Congress and Congressional staff,” Garland said. “Consistent with our commitment to the rule of law, we must ensure that full weight is accorded to separation-of-powers concerns moving forward.”
Garland also said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco “is already working on surfacing potentially problematic matters deserving high level review,” which he did not describe further. According to him, he’s also asked Monaco “to evaluate and strengthen the department’s existing policies and procedures for obtaining records of the Legislative branch.”
Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department dramatically amped up investigations into leaks of classified material, securing more convictions than all other presidential administrations combined. Trump’s national security team took that work even further; at a press conference in August 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that since the end of the Obama administration, the department had tripled the number of leak probes underway.
In the years following that press conference, the department secured numerous convictions and prison sentences for people who shared classified information with newsmen. But now its senior leadership faces condemnation for its scrutiny of newsmen — including at the New York Times and Washington Post.
President Joe Biden said the previous month that it was wrong for the department to seize newsmen’ records. DOJ afterwards announced that it would no longer do so, despite longstanding regulations that create a process to approve such subpoenas in some cases. The attorney general must approve any efforts by DOJ to obtain journalists’ records.
The previous week, the Department’s internal watchdog announced the opening of an investigation into how DOJ came to scoop up the legislators’ records.
Garland’s statement and word of Demers planned exit come as the attorney general is set to meet this afternoon with the leaders of three newsrooms whose records were seized by DOJ.
The New York Times first reported the news of Demers’ impending departure. He has stayed at the department longer than his other Trump-appointed colleagues because senior officials there repeatedly asked him to postpone his departure, the source told a news outlet. This was Demers’ third stint at DOJ.
The previous month, Biden nominated longtime national-security lawyer Matt Olsen to take over Justice’s National Security Division. As a top Justice Department lawyer during President Barack Obama’s administration, Olsen oversaw a major review of war-on-terror detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. He also served as general counsel to the National Security Agency and as head of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Olsen is currently the security chief for Uber, a position he has held since 2018.