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Lawyers for indicted ex-Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) assert that documents released earlier this month by the House Judiciary Committee show the Justice Department unlawfully revealed information about him in 2006, Politico reported last night.

Rick Renzi (Gov)

The House Judiciary Committee released more than 5,000 pages of documents regarding the 2006 U.S. Attorney purge August 11. Renzi’s attorneys claim that a panel interview with former White House counsel Harriet Miers and some of the e-mails released by the committee “strongly suggest that officials in the highest levels of the Justice Department leaked grand jury material and that those leaks were done at the behest of White House officials for improper political purposes,” according to a motion filed Wednesday and obtained by Politico.

Renzi, who served in Congress from 2003 to 2009, was indicted in February 2008 on a number of federal corruption charges.

His attorneys have said before that articles published in the Arizona Republic only weeks before the 2006 election included information unlawfully disclosed by DOJ about the Renzi probe, according to Politico. Now, the Renzi legal team is using an Oct. 24, 2006 e-mail exchange between Miers and Bush Political Affairs Deputy Director Scott Jennings about the leak to bolster their argument, Politico said.

Miers told Jennings that she had contacted former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty to find out why a DOJ official had disclosed that Renzi was being probed, according to Politico.

Shortly after the e-mail exchange, an unnamed DOJ official told the Arizona Republic that the Renzi probe was “not a well-developed investigation, by any means.” Read The Republic article here.

The DOJ official said that The Republic should “be careful” in its coverage of the investigation.

“I can confirm to you a very early investigation,” the DOJ official told the newspaper. “But I want to caution you not to chop this guy’s [Renzi] head off.”