Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) is heading home from Washington, D.C., in less than two weeks, and he doesn't seem to sorry to say goodbye. The Trump administration, he told the Sinclair Broadcast Group, is not all it was cracked up to be.
"The reality is, sadly, I don't see much difference between the Trump administration and the Obama administration," Chaffetz, the House Oversight Committee chairman, said. "I thought there would be this, these floodgates would open up with all the documents we wanted from the Department of State, the Department of Justice, the Pentagon."
Chaffetz was careful in assigning blame, admitting, "I think if we went to the senior-most people, even the president himself, they would be pulling their hair out and they would hate to hear that." But Chaffetz did have one person he was willing to point a finger at: Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
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"In many ways, [the Trump administration is] almost worse [than the Obama administration] because we're getting nothing, and that's terribly frustrating and, with all due respect, the attorney general has not changed at all," Chaffetz said. "I find him to be worse than what I saw with Loretta Lynch in terms of releasing documents and making things available. I just, that's my experience, and that's not what I expected."
In May, Chaffetz abruptly announced his plans to leave Congress at the end of June. As he told the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the decision hinged on wanting to spend more time with his wife and children. But the obstacles his committee faced in its probes clearly irks him, too: "We have everything from the Hillary Clinton email investigation, which is really one of the critical things. There was the investigation into the IRS. And one that was more than seven years old is Fast and Furious. I mean, we have been in court trying to pry those documents out of the Department of Justice and still to this day, they will not give us those documents. And at the State Department, nothing," Chaffetz said. "Stone-cold silence."
Read the full interview here.
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