The six Democrats, who serve as the ranking members of congressional committees, say they’re trying to recruit Ryan’s help because they’ve exhausted all their other options.
“Our goal is to obtain the documents collected and prepared by our federal agencies about these Russian attacks in order to take concrete steps to prevent them from happening again,” they wrote in a letter to Ryan on Tuesday.
“Unfortunately
we are being blocked by Trump Administration officials who refuse to produce these documents to Congress and by Republican Chairmen who refuse to demand them. These actions create the unfortunate perception that House Republicans do not want to obtain these documents relating to the Russian attacks against state election systems,” they added.
A top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official revealed during an appearance on Capitol Hill last June that Russia had targeted election-related systems in 21 states leading up to the 2016 presidential election, while declining to identify which states were impacted for confidentiality purposes. DHS has repeatedly said there is no evidence that any votes were changed.
In January, the Democrats recounted in their letter how they pressed DHS for specific information about the affected 21 states, including “the names of the state officials or offices that were notified.”
The Democrats additionally describe their multiple attempts to wrestle the documents from DHS, saying the law enforcement agency repeatedly produced unsatisfactory responses to their requests.
In one case, they said the agency turned over 50 pages of documents to the lawmakers about Moscow’s meddling that largely “consisted of publicly available documents.”
“
To our knowledge, the Trump Administration has not provided any Committee in the House of Representatives with these classified documents about Russian-backed attacks against state election systems,” they wrote.