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In the last chapter I was ‘wetting the bed’ over the Dems missing their big chance in the next two years while this list of investigations the various committees are planning is pretty reassuring.

“Here comes the flood.”

With the Democrats having won control of the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump and his crew in the White House and assorted federal agencies can expect to be hit by a wave of investigations and subpoena requests from Capitol Hill. There are dozens of House committees and subcommittees, and each no doubt has its own to-do list.

The House Intelligence Committee, under the chairmanship of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), will certainly revive aspects of the Trump-Russia probe that House Republicans smothered. The House Foreign Affairs Committee surely will consider examining the Trump-Saudi relationship in light of the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi. You can bet the Homeland Security Committee will investigate the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, and the Armed Services Committee will examine whether there was any reason for Trump to send 15,000 troops to the border to deal with a migrant caravan.

UPDATE: HSPCI under Adam Schiff is ramping up their investigation of Saudi influence at the Russia House-which is very good as Russian Collusion wasn’t only the Russians but the Saudis and UAE-Chapter A

More generally Schiff is focusing on the cardinal question of wether or not Trump is a national security threat-at the July 23 hearing, Mueller confirmed the FBI has an ongoing counterintelligence probe into this very question.

Indeed day by day more evidence that Trump is acting not for US interests but for both his own  personal and foreign interests emerges.

End of UPDATE

Cummings Oversight Committee has a lot to look at but one thing I’m looking forward to seeing is a hearing into the wide use of private emails in the Russia House-after all Trump ‘won’ because of the alleged scandal of Hillary’s emails.

You can read the whole list. But here is a sampling of the topics Cummings and his Democratic colleagues have set their sights on:

  • White House security clearances (involving Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, national security adviser John Bolton, and others)
  • The controversial addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census
  • The Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban
  • The State Department’s decision to close its cyber office
  • The Environmental Protection Agency’s use of a political loyalty list
  • The possible participation of Cambridge Analytica’s foreign employees in US elections
  • The deadly ambush in Niger that left four American soldiers dead
  • The use of private email by White House officials
  • Trump’s response to the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico
  • The dealings of the Trump Foundation
  • Potential conflicts of interest between Kushner’s business actions and his policy advice
  • Payments the Trump Organization received from foreign sources
  • Russian intervention with state voting systems
  • Former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with foreign officials

“We could follow up on any and all items on this list,” a Democratic staffer on the committee says. The panel would not likely issue 64 subpoenas on day one. Cummings, as chairman of the committee, would initially send out what are known as “chairman letters”—essentially polite but official requests for documents or testimony. But as chairman, he would be able to back up these requests with the threat of subpoena.

Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have also been tracking all the times they have been turned down. In September, the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), published a 67-page summary of their efforts to “Document the Failings of the Trump Administration.” It provides something of a roadmap for what the committee might do in the next Congress. The report chronicles the more than 140 times in the past 22 months that Democratic members of the committee have sent “oversight letters” to the Trump administration, usually requesting information—and usually getting no substantive reply. Many of these requests overlapped with those issued by the Democrats on the Oversight Committee.

These letters signal the Democrats’ interests in dozens of subjects. Those include:

  • Nepotism in the Trump White House
  • Trump’s (now-shuttered) voter fraud commission
  • Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ inaccurate congressional testimony about his pre-election contacts with Russian officials and his post-election recusal from the Russian investigation
  • Sessions’ reversal of Justice Department criminal justice reform initiatives
  • Ivanka Trump’s business affairs and potential conflicts of interest
  • Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey
  • Trump administration measures (or lack thereof) to secure elections from foreign interference
  • The White House’s use of non-disclosure agreements
  • Payments received by Michael Cohen when he was Trump’s personal attorney
  • Hush money Cohen paid to porn star Stormy Daniels (an action for which he pleaded guilty to a federal crime, while maintaining that Trump had been part of a criminal conspiracy)
  • Trump’s endorsement of a Chinese telecommunications firm, a move that raised ethics concerns
  • Trump’s income tax returns (which several Democrats have said they would seek)

Bestill my beating heart: the Judiciary Committee will  be looking at Comeygate-that’s kind of a big concern of mine if you haven’t figured it out by now.

UPDATE: Of course, there is still very little public information in answer to most of these questions. Part of this is due to Trump’s unprecedented intransigence-he simply declared in a blanket way that we will fight all the subpoenas and has-sought to-prevented Trump associates from testifying with a claim of blanket executive privilege-which of course lacks no legal basis though most of his co-conspirators have obeyed his baseless order. According to  Siege, Michael Wolff’s sequel, Don McGahn hates Trump. Even if this is true apparently not enough to defy him and deliver the goods on him. Maybe he’s waiting to be compelled so that he’s not totally personal non grata in GOP co-conspirator world.

OTOH in many ways the Dems simply haven’t been nearly aggressive enough in the first eight months of their House rule. There’s reason to hope that could be changing-now that apparently they have some sort of impeachment  lite inquiry going-they’re willing to tell a federal judge they are doing an inquiry but still nervous about telling the public.

For instance Richard Neal took three months to ask for Trump’s tax returns and last we heard he still hasn’t gone to court to enforce his perfectly legal request. He is on the one hand rebuffing NY’s considerate offering of Trump’s state returns under the questionable premise it will undermine the court fight for the federal returns. OTOH he has yet to go to court for them-how to do you undermine a legal case you haven’t even begun?

UPDATE to UPDATE:

It looks like the Dems are finally moving asking a federal judge to expedite their request for six years of Trump’s tax returns.

OTOH it looks like Elijah Cummings has been fairly aggressive in pursuing information about the security clearances and private emails-though he hasn’t revealed much publicly yet-which is the name of the game-if as Pelosi argues we need to bring the public along then a great deal more needs to be made public.

Again I say this even while noting that the Russia House has showed unprecedented obstruction-the Dems in their case in federal court argue that Trump’s actions undermine 230 years of Congressional Oversight and they’re right.

Trump’s lawyers are essentially arguing that Congress has no oversight role-they have to have a specific legislative purpose for any request-claiming that Congress may not Executive accountable.

Trump’s personal legal team endorsed the Justice Department’s argument in a separate filing Tuesday, urging the court to give great weight to DOJ’s claims.

Trump’s personal lawyers contend the committee overstepped its authority by subpoenaing the president’s personal records, arguing the committee failed to identify a legitimate “legislative purpose” to support its demands. Last week, the Justice Department echoed those arguments, suggesting courts should look dubiously at any efforts by Congress to “regulate the president.”

“The lack of any historical support for a legislative subpoena from a standing committee of Congress for the president’s records — directed to a third-party custodian no less — raises constitutional red flags,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, calling the committee’s demands “blunderbuss” and unreasonably broad.

In response, House general counsel Douglas Letter and his deputies rejected that as “an astounding and novel theory of limited congressional power to conduct investigations and oversight.”

Letter invoked the St. Clair investigation of 1792, when Washington acknowledged that a House inquiry for presidential papers could be valid “as the public good would permit.” He went on to cite an 1861 investigation of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, the Pearl Harbor investigation of 1945, Congress’ access to Richard Nixon’s tax returns, the Iran-Contra investigation of 1987 and the Whitewater investigation that began in 1995 as examples of presidents being targeted by — and at times responsive to — congressional inquiries.

“Presidents from George Washington on (unlike Mr. Trump) have understood that Congress has the power to conduct investigations and oversight of the president as part of the constitutional design,” the attorneys added.

If this novel theory were correct there’d basically be no oversight function for Congress-the Trump argument is basically Congress can only legislate not engage in oversight.

Which is absurd, of course. The 1924 law that lets Congress acquire the tax returns of the President and top cabinet officials is broad-there’s no narrow litmus test of acceptable reasons it can ask for them.

End of UPDATE

Judiciary Committee Democrats, as noted in the report, have also asked the Justice Department inspector general to investigate whether FBI officials and agents leaked information during the 2016 campaign to benefit Trump and whether Trump and his aides, after the election, sought to discredit career investigators and the independence of the FBI. ”

Besides the vitally important issue of leaks prior to the election that ultimately forced Comey’s hand-and the larger Emailgate investigation, hopefully they will also look at Comey’s fake Russian doc and consider the many questions it raises, including if it was among the materials Joseph Schmitz brought to the FBI in the Summer of 2016-it’s also vital to follow the FBI since the election-my guess is that the rogue Trump agents hold even more sway at the FBI now-as their guy is ‘President.’

UPDATE: As noted in Chapter A I’m not aware of any Democrat attempts to answer the question of FBI rogue agent anti Clinton pro Trump leaks prior to the 2016 election since the Democrats were sworn in January, 2019. After the initial IG report in June, 2018 the IG had promised a sequel regarding the leaks of the rogue agents. This has not been forthcoming.

The obvious next step is for the Dems to ask the IG what happened to this sequel? But so far as I’m aware they have not done this basic, obvious thing and so we’re probably going to get further IG reports about the Steele Dossier and Stephan Halper and the predicate of the Russia investigation while still not hearing a peep about the leaks of the anti Clinton pro Trump FBI agents.

If you doubt that there’s what Greg Sargent calls a hardball gap between the parties this is exhibit one-and it shows why it matters. In a way the GOP question of the basic etymology and predication of the Trump-Russia investigation is natural enough. What’s unnatural is the Democrat’s utter failure to demand answers regarding the etymology and predication of Emailgate-as I do in Chapter A; I argue that it’s debatable it was every adequately predicated in the first place.

I do something in that chapter no one else has done but what makes my chapter an outlier isn’t the question just that I’m a Democrat-the Republicans have demanded answers to this obvious question regarding Trump-Russia. For a Democrat I’m unusual as to be a Democrat seems to mean you concede the point without an argument. The-Republican-FBI Director-in the entire history of the FBI there has never been a Democratic Director- said there was probable cause to investigate your Presidential candidate-who just happened to be the first female major party nominee in history-in the middle of an election?  Just take this at face value so as not to seem partisan.

The Democrats always back down out of fear of seeming partisan-LBJ did it after Nixon rigged the 1968 election; Obama did it in 2016 feeling that having Russia pick the President was not as undesirable as having Mitch McConnell lambast him as a partisan-which if true would make him no worse than #MoscowMitch himself.

The more I think about it the more Jess Zimmerman’s thesis fits-the Democratic party is the girl of American politics-Chapter A.

UPDATE

“Nadler and Cummings have also requested subpoenas of Trump campaign data consultants regarding any communications they had with foreign actors during the 2016 campaign. One member of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), has introduced legislation to force Trump to create a public database of visitors to his Mar-a-Lago resort—a topic the committee could take up.

Nadler will also look to investigate Kavanaugnhand the fake FBI’s ‘investigation’-a good question regarding that investigation’s inadequacy is how much of that was due to rogue Trump agents throwing sand in the gears? Perhaps the same rogue agents who forced Comey’s hand

 

Yes, I understand Trump construed the investigation so narrowly that it was bound to be inadequate if these narrow parameters were observed. But as we saw in (Chapter D) the FBI could have chosen to do more on its own-there is always discretion. How much-if at all-was it also shaped by the Trump loyalists within the agency?

UPDATE: The Dems largely punted on Kavanaugh-it’s now clear that Schumer-and Dianne Feinstein[1]-pulled his punches in the initial confirmation fight once they got into power though they have recently-pushed by their restive base-taken it up again. Murder She Wrote has more. Episode Peter Strozk Gold in particular around about the 14:00 mark.

https://www.muellershewrote.com/

Now we get to the topic of what Schiff calls ruthless prioritization:

“The Democrats will not lack for investigative targets. As these reports show, there is a potpourri of possibilities for Democratic investigators—from Trump’s violations of the emoluments clause to pay-to-play policymaking. The challenge will be deciding what to focus on—and perhaps resisting calls for an impeachment investigation. For partisans seeking to pin down Trump, the best strategy may be to eschew impeachment in favor of a series of easy-to-justify oversight investigations. The Trump White House already is dysfunctional. It is light on bodies and lighter on experience and competence. Faced with information requests and subpoenas from multiple committees across multiple fronts, the White House and the entire Trump administration will have a tough job responding and getting anything done. A fusillade of legitimate probes will probably present more of a threat to Trump than an impeachment inquiry that, even if successful in the House, would run into a brick wall in the GOP-controlled Senate.

I certainly agree with this-in the short term. I’ve always been clear-Donald Trump should be impeached: if that’s where the facts lead. First Democrats have to find the facts. This will come both via Mueller and their own investigations.

As suggested elsewhere I envision Trump being impeached but if so probably not till 2020-ideally 11 days before the 2020 election just like the 2016 Comey letter was.

UPDATE: Axios reports the Dems are planning a ‘subpoena cannon’ of 85 different targets. 

Music to my ears.

Here is a symphony to my ears: Schiff has declared “it’s not my intention to sit by idly while we await Mueller.”

UPDATE: In retrospect though the take that Dems should investigate not impeach has aged very poorly-for starters Trump simply ignored all subpoenas and requests for documents and information-even regarding very routine and basic stuff.

Indeed, now the Dems despite all the impeachment phobia based on the ‘savvy’ narrative of both MSM pundits and Democratic consultants-Jay Rosen argues this is the same basic class

have essentially backed into an impeachment inquiry as the best way to break Trump’s obstructionist logjam.

 

  1. The legit criticism of Feinstein's timing isn't that she leaked it so late-in fact she didn't leak it at all-it's that she was going to bury it which was contrary to Dr. Ford's wishes ↵

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