Combing through the unpublished supporting evidence of an inspector general’s report, Democratic committee staff found emails that appeared to show that Trump, in spite of his own denials, had ordered the reversal of plans to move the F.B.I. headquarters to a suburban location and off Pennsylvania Avenue, where it currently sits across from the Trump Hotel — a reversal that would benefit his hotel by preventing commercial developers from building a competing property across the street. “The Cummings people did a lot of great investigative work without formal tools,” says Phil Barnett, who was the staff director of the Oversight Committee under Waxman. “Now they will have formal tools.”
In September, Pelosi invited Cummings to her Capitol office, along with two other Democratic congressmen who, if the party won the House in November, would become chairmen of committees with powerful investigative mandates: New York’s Jerrold Nadler, of the Judiciary Committee, and California’s Adam Schiff, of the Intelligence Committee. There they were joined by several Democratic representatives who worked previously as prosecutors: Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts, Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland and Eric Swalwell of California. Pelosi told the group that they shouldn’t take the outcome of the midterms for granted. At the same time, she said, the Democrats needed to begin thinking about how they would conduct oversight of the Trump administration — and the strategizing needed to start now.
Like Cummings, Nadler and Schiff chafed at their committees’ Republican chairmen’s lack of interest and outright interference during the Trump presidency. Mueller’s investigators have spent months building an increasingly sweeping case about Russian meddling in the 2016 elections, implicating and indicting several of Trump’s closest associates to date. But under the chairmanship of the Republican Devin Nunes of California, the House Intelligence Committee — which has a clear constitutional authority to conduct some of the same investigatory work as Mueller — produced a report that breezily concluded that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government and that, contrary to the official consensus of the American intelligence community, the Russian government was not even seeking to help elect Trump. Committee Democrats said they were shut out of the drafting process and publicly condemned the report.
Nunes also initiated parallel investigations of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department for what he claimed was “criminal activity and fraudulent behavior” in an effort to hurt Trump’s campaign — investigations that Schiff contends “I think that the mission for the chairman has been protecting the White House, protecting the president and furthering a political narrative which is completely at odds with the facts,” Schiff told me.
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement, following a new and unprecedented Trump administration policy, separated more than 2,300 immigrant children from their families at the Southern border this spring, the Republican-led Judiciary Committee did not hold a single oversight hearing for Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whose agency falls under the committee’s oversight jurisdiction. Other committees, too, had their own lists of Trump-administration oversight oversights: the Natural Resources Committee’s lack of interest in Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s suspected ethical and managerial misdeeds, which have been the subject of at least 17 federal investigations, for instance; or the Veterans Affairs Committee’s refusal to look into whether three Trump friends, all Mar-a-Lago members, improperly influenced a $10 billion contract to modernize veterans’ health care records. “The oversight job, after two years of Donald Trump,” says Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who serves on both the Oversight and Judiciary Committees, “is like coming upon a 73-car pileup on the highway.”
With so many targets, and so many hungry Democrats, “there’s the potential for oversight fratricide next year,” says a senior Democratic official on the Intelligence Committee, noting the overlapping jurisdictions of the various committees. There’s also the potential for distraction. “The question is, do you want to be the Breaking News Committee that just investigates the issue of the day?” asks Swalwell, who sits on the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. “Or do you want to look at broader, longstanding core issues?” At that September meeting and at multiple gatherings of members and their staffs over the subsequent weeks and months, an initial strategy — and a division of labor — began to take shape.
Schiff, the incoming Intelligence Committee chairman, will play a major role. One of his top priorities will be protecting — and assisting — Mueller’s investigation, and one of his first acts in the new Congress will be trying to get to the bottom of one of the more tantalizing mysteries of the whole Russia affair: Whom did Donald Trump Jr. speak to on his phone in between calls setting up the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton? Trump Jr. claims he can’t remember, and the call appears as a blocked number on his phone records. Nunes refused to ask Trump Jr.’s cellular provider for the blocked number. “That phone call may lead to a place the Republicans didn’t want to go,” Schiff says, “and so they were unwilling to get the answer.” Schiff wants the answer and will press the provider for it.
from Just News Update https://ift.tt/2CizigE
0 Comments