Letter From House, Signaling a Probe Ahead, Asks Georgetown Law To Preserve the Records of Election Project

Congressman Pete Sessions, signaling a probe ahead, is demanding that Georgetown University’s Law Center preserve the records of its “Transition Integrity Project” and its work on the 2022 election and on the pending vote in November. Mr. Sessions’s demand is in a letter dated Thursday on the letterhead of the House Oversight Committee. It advises Georgetown to, among other things, “preserve all work product and communications” from the TIP ‘s “war gaming exercise” on the 2020 election. The letter — addressed to a Georgetown law professor, Rosa Brooks — is a request mainly for information. Such requests are often a prelude to a subpoena. Mr. Sessions notes that TIP is “adjacent” to the Georgetown Law Center, which “receives hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding every year.”Mr. Sessions writes: “As our nation prepares for the 2024 presidential election, the work of TIP has been brought to my attention as an intensely partisan exercise intended to sew [sow] dissension and subversion regarding the American election system and the institution of the president of the United States.”TIP itself explains that it was originally launched “out of concern” that the Trump Administration “may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election.” The participants in TIP, according to Ms. Brooks, “didn’t want to lie awake at night contemplating the ways the American experiment could fail.” She wrote that in the Washington Post. To prevent that, Ms. Brooks writes that the TIF “built a series of war games, sought out some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around, and asked them to imagine what they’d do in a range of election and transition scenarios.” Now, though, Mr. Sessions writes that it would be “highly inappropriate for a university that relies on federal funding to conduct partisan political activity.” Participants in the “war games” comprised, among others, the one time chair of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, and the former White House chief of staff, John Podesta. The letter alludes to that op-ed Ms. Brooks wrote in the Washington Post in September of 2020. Entitled “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?,” it predicted that “with the exception of the ‘big Biden win’ scenario, each of our exercises reached the brink of catastrophe, with massive disinformation campaigns, violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse.”Mr. Sessions also spotlights another Georgetown affiliate, the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protections, known as “ICAP.” That is led by Professor Mary McCord. She has been quoted by NBC News as saying that “We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things” that Mr. Trump could do so “that we’re ready to bring lawsuits.”ICAP describes itself as non-partisan, but NBC identifies it as part of a “loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” who are “quietly devising plans to try to foil any efforts to expand presidential power, which could include pressuring the military to cater” to Mr. Trump’s political needs. Ms. McCord reports to Ms. Brooks. Any attempt to curtail presidential power over the military would have to contend with the Constitution’s mandate, in Article II, that the “President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States.”Article II, in creating the presidency, also ordains that the “executive Power” — all of it — “shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” It makes the Executive the only branch of the American government that vests all of the powers it grants entirely in one individual.The Sun has sought comment from Ms. Brooks, Georgetown, and Mr. Sessions.

Letter From House, Signaling a Probe Ahead, Asks Georgetown Law To Preserve the Records of Election Project

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