The following article by Nicholas Fandos was posted on the New York Times website October 24, 2017:
WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Tuesday announced investigations into two of President Trump’s most frequent grievances, unveiling new inquiries into actions of the Obama administration connected to Hillary Clinton.
In the first of two back-to-back announcements, the top Republicans on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees said they would formally examine the Obama Justice Department’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s emails. Less than an hour later, Republicans from the Intelligence and Oversight Committees said they were opening a separate inquiry into the administration’s approval of a 2010 agreement that left a Russian-backed company in control of much of the United States’ uranium.
Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California and the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said he had not discussed his investigation with the White House. But the uranium deal and the Justice Department’s handling of the Clinton case have been regular targets of Mr. Trump’s, first on the 2016 presidential campaign trail and now in Washington.
Last week, the president wrote on Twitter that the uranium deal was done “with Clinton help and Obama administration knowledge” and was “the biggest story that Fake Media doesn’t want to follow!”
Mr. Trump has also raised questions about the conduct of James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, particularly the fact that Mr. Comey began drafting a statement exonerating Mrs. Clinton several months before the investigation closed.
Democrats immediately dismissed the inquiries as nakedly partisan attempts to distract attention from four continuing investigations — by the Senate and House intelligence committees, the Senate Judiciary Committee and Robert S. Mueller III, a special counsel — into Russia’s interference in last year’s presidential election and whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russian officials in any way.
Representatives Elijah E. Cummings and John Conyers Jr., the top Democrats on the Oversight and Judiciary Committees, said in a joint statement that the investigations amounted to “a massive diversion to distract from the lack of Republican oversight of the Trump administration and the national security threat that Russia poses.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee is already examining the Justice Department’s handling of the Clinton email case as a part of its broader investigation. In recent weeks, the committee has also raised questions about the uranium deal with the Justice Department and other federal agencies. The committee’s chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, wrote in a tweet late Tuesday that the Justice Department ought to appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter.
Representatives Robert W. Goodlatte and Trey Gowdy, the chairmen of the Judiciary and Oversight committees, said on Tuesday that their inquiry would center on decisions by Mr. Comey to break agency custom and publicly announce the close of the Clinton investigation and to alert Congress of the investigation’s status on multiple occasions. In addition, they said they would study what role Justice Department officials, presumably including the former attorney general Loretta E. Lynch, played in finalizing the case during last year’s election.
“The committees will review these decisions and others to better understand the reasoning behind how certain conclusions were drawn,” the chairmen wrote in a joint statement.
Mr. Nunes said his investigation would focus on how the Obama administration handled the uranium agreement in 2010, when Russia’s nuclear energy agency, Rosatom, was allowed to acquire Uranium One, a company that owned access to significant uranium holdings in the United States.
Republicans have long tried to tie Mrs. Clinton to the deal. It required the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, on which Mrs. Clinton’s State Department had a voting seat. Republicans have made unproven allegations that Mrs. Clinton was part of a quid pro quo in which the Clinton Foundation received large donations in exchange for support of the deal.
Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign and State Department officials have said Mrs. Clinton was not involved in the decision, and that all other members of the committee had signed on anyway.
The issue has been revived in recent weeks by The Hill newspaper, which reported that the F.B.I. had gathered evidence before the deal was finalized that Russian officials were engaged in bribery, extortion and money laundering to expand Russia’s nuclear interests in the United States.
Mr. Nunes said the Republicans want to know whether the F.B.I. or the Justice Department had opened an investigation at the time into any attempts by Russian officials to curry favor for the deal.
“Our job here is to get the facts,” Mr. Nunes said. “We are the legislative branch of government, and we will do just that.”
Representative Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida and a member of the Oversight Committee, said on Tuesday that the committees had identified a confidential informant in the case who wanted to talk about the deal but had entered into a nondisclosure agreement with the Justice Department.
Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for Mrs. Clinton and the Justice Department, dismissed the new investigations on Tuesday, saying the committees were taking their cues from Mr. Trump on two issues that have been exhaustively examined.
“This is clearly an attempt to throw sand at the eyes of the public at a time when Bob Mueller’s investigation is closing in on allegations related to Russia’s involvement in the election,” Mr. Fallon said. “It’s transparent to the point of being farcical.”
Democrats have squared off with Mr. Nunes and Mr. Gowdy in the past. Mr. Nunes was forced to step aside from leading the investigation in April after it was disclosed that he had received classified information from the White House that showed that Mr. Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies. He said on Tuesday that the new inquiry was a separate matter.
Mr. Gowdy, who continues to help lead the committee’s Russia investigation, spent nearly three years investigating Mrs. Clinton’s role in the deadly 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya.
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