These Democrats Will Soon Have the Power to Investigate the White House. How Far Will They Go?
This is a great, informative article if you have an opportunity to read it in its entirety.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/magazine/democrats-trump-investigation.html
These Democrats Will Soon Have the Power to Investigate the White House. How Far Will They Go?
In two weeks, congressional Democrats will return to Washington with the authority to investigate a White House that is suspected of foreign collusion, conflicts of interest and mismanagement of the federal government.
By Jason Zengerle
Dec. 17, 2018
At noon on Jan. 3, the 435 members of the House of Representatives of the 116th Congress will convene for the first time in the Capitol. The chaplain will offer a prayer, the clerk will lead the chamber in the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll-call vote will be held to elect Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House. Then the new speaker will grasp the gavel and swear in the representatives-elect — their right hands raised, some of them clutching Bibles or Torahs or Qurans in their left. There will be speeches and family photos and, among the Democrats, who will now be in the majority, much celebration. But before any of that happens, Representative Elijah Cummings will have sent out letters.
One letter will have been jointly addressed to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, demanding the age, gender, country of origin and current location of every child who was separated from his or her parents under the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Another will have gone to Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, asking for the identities of any senior White House officials who have used — as Hillary Clinton once did — nongovernment email accounts to conduct official business.
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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.
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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.
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When Nadler ran to succeed Conyers as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, his pitch included a leaflet he wrote and distributed to his fellow Democrats, which said that he was “our strongest member to lead a potential impeachment.” Since clinching the chairmanship, however, Nadler has become much more circumspect, at least publicly, about impeachment. “It’s too early,” he told me in November. “It’s a very momentous step. It has real consequences.” Even if Robert Mueller or congressional Democrats uncover what he concludes are impeachable offenses, Nadler told me, he would want to begin impeachment proceedings only if he believes that, by the end of the process, there would be an “appreciable fraction of the Trump voters” who support Trump’s impeachment.
“You don’t want to tear the country apart,” Nadler said. “You don’t want a situation where for the next 30 years half the country is saying, ‘We won the election; you stole it from us.’ ” He added an interesting caveat, however: “Now notice I didn’t say an appreciable fraction of Republican senators. It’s the Trump voters. Because it might be — I’m not saying it is, but it might be — that the Republican Party becomes so one-sided, or such a cult group in effect, that no matter what the evidence is, no matter what the malfeasances are, they” — Republican senators — “would never agree to break from the president.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/magazine/democrats-trump-investigation.html
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