Representatives Elijah Cummings and Eric Swalwell Introduced a Bill in Again in January 2017
Characteristic
These Democrats Will Soon Take the Power to Investigate the White House. How Far Volition 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 regime.
From left, Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff and Elijah Cummings. Credit... Bobby Doherty for The New York Times
At noon on Jan. 3, the 435 members of the House of Representatives of the 116th Congress will convene for the commencement time in the Capitol. The chaplain volition offering a prayer, the clerk volition lead the chamber in the Pledge of Allegiance and a gyre-phone call vote will be held to elect Nancy Pelosi speaker of the Business firm. Then the new speaker volition 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 unit photos and, among the Democrats, who volition now be in the majority, much celebration. But before whatsoever of that happens, Representative Elijah Cummings will have sent out letters.
One letter of the alphabet will accept been jointly addressed to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Homeland Security Secretarial assistant Kirstjen Nielsen and acting Chaser General Matthew Whitaker, demanding the age, gender, country of origin and electric current location of every child who was separated from his or her parents under the Trump administration's clearing policy. Another will take gone to Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, asking for the identities of whatsoever senior White House officials who have used — as Hillary Clinton once did — nongovernment email accounts to behave official business.
The White House chief of staff volition have received a letter, too addressed to the heads of multiple federal agencies, requesting data and documents about the employ of government-owned aircraft for personal travel and private aircraft for official travel. Outside the government, the Trump Organization will have received one request for a complete accounting of all the payments it has received from strange governments or foreign-government-owned entities since Donald Trump's election. Each letter volition accept been written on jotter bearing the seal of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and signed with Cummings'southward looping signature over the word: "Chairman-designate."
Elected to the House in 1996, Cummings, 67, represents a majority-African-American district anchored in Baltimore. He is a son of two erstwhile sharecroppers turned Pentecostal ministers; his bald head and booming baritone projection a ministerial — and authoritative — presence. Until now, Cummings's greatest national renown came in 2015: During the riots that followed Freddie Gray'south expiry from injuries he sustained in a Baltimore police van, Fox News broadcast live coverage of the congressman walking through the city's streets, bullhorn in hand, urging at-home and shouting at protesters to go dwelling house.
"I'one thousand not trying to exercise anything extraordinary," Cummings told me of the letters. "I'one thousand trying to practice what the Constitution says I'g supposed to do." It was election nighttime, and he was at a small political party in Baltimore, where he had but been informed by a colleague, Representative John Sarbanes of Maryland, that the networks were declaring that Democrats would have a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 2011. "Mr. Chairman!" Sarbanes said in breaking the news.
The midterm results effectively brought an stop to Trump's legislative calendar, or at least the parts of information technology that Democrats notice objectionable. Only the victory gives Democrats little legislative power of their own. If by some phenomenon whatsoever Democrat-authored Firm bill makes it through the Republican-controlled Senate, Trump'due south veto pen awaits.
What the House Democrats will take, nevertheless, is oversight authority: the ability to hold hearings and asking documents and, if necessary, issue subpoenas to uncover and betrayal all the incompetence and misconduct and outright corruption that they doubtable permeates the executive branch under the electric current occupant of the White House. "Make no mistake, Democrats will honour our constitutional responsibility to exercise oversight of the Trump administration and become the American people the answers they deserve," Pelosi said in a statement. "Voters delivered a bank check and rest on the president that will hold him and his administration accountable for the abuses of power and civilisation of abuse that have consumed Washington." Trump is already besieged by the investigation led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, into Russian interference in the 2016 elections and by multiple probes by the United States attorney's office for the Southern District of New York into his family business. In Jan, he will face a Autonomous-controlled House of Representatives that all of a sudden has the ability to open a 3rd investigative front against him — power that will reside, in big part, in Cummings'southward part.
Paradigm
That power is both broad and subtle. The Oversight and Government Reform Commission'southward mandate is investigation, across the whole range of federal government operations — and even into the private sector. (The 3-year congressional investigation into the use of steroids in Major League Baseball in the 2000s was a Firm Oversight production.) Other committees have the power to investigate, also, but none have and so expansive a remit. "Oversight," says erstwhile Representative Henry Waxman of California, the Democratic chairman of the committee from 2007 to 2009, "has jurisdiction over the world."
This has given Cummings'southward predecessors a unique ability to shape the public perception of recent presidencies — peculiarly when, as will exist the case in Jan, it is a president of the other party. Many of the familiar details of the George Westward. Bush assistants's outing of the covert C.I.A. amanuensis Valerie Plame, emergency-response failures during Hurricane Katrina and disastrous reconstruction of Iraq were ferreted out by Waxman, who led the Oversight and Authorities Reform Committee for the last two years of Bush's 2nd term. The congressional investigations of the Obama administration — into claims that the Internal Revenue Service targeted Tea Party groups and that the Justice Department immune guns to be illegally trafficked across the Mexican border — that dominated Play a trick on News chyrons afterwards Republicans took back the House in 2011 were started by Waxman's Republican successor, Darrell Issa.
Every bit a dominion, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee is a sleepy place when the same party controls Congress and the White Business firm. Simply even by these standards, the committee'south performance during the kickoff two years of the Trump administration has been unusual. Under the chairmanship of Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah then, after Chaffetz resigned in June 2017 and took a job at Fox News, Representative Trey Gowdy of Due south Carolina, the committee substantially turned a blind eye toward the executive branch. On matters large (similar the firing of the F.B.I. director, James Comey, or the administration'south botched response to Hurricane Maria) and insufficiently small (like Trump's decision to revoke the security clearance of the sometime C.I.A. director John Brennan), the Oversight Committee did not seem interested in doing much real oversight.
"If the president's political party on Capitol Hill becomes subservient to the executive branch and simply becomes an bagginess of that, so Congress basically loses its meaning," Tom Davis, the Virginia Republican who was chairman of the commission during part of Bush's presidency, from 2003 to 2007, told me. "Nosotros plow into a parliamentary performance." Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, puts it even more than bluntly. "Looking back over the first two years of the assistants," he says, "I can't point to a single example, House or Senate, where whatsoever committee or subcommittee actually fulfilled its role of doing oversight."
Over the by 2 years, as the commission's ranking member, Cummings issued 64 subpoena requests; they were requests because the minority party can't issue subpoenas without the majority's approval. Chaffetz and Gowdy rejected them all. And fifty-fifty when Chaffetz or Gowdy did ask the Trump administration for data, they didn't button very hard. "I was able to become them to jointly request documents that nosotros needed to exercise our job," Cummings told me, "but when the assistants basically said, 'Screw you' — and the administration basically said that to every request — they refused to back it upwards with a amendment." Indeed, the kickoff requests Cummings will send out every bit the incoming Oversight chairman — the letters nigh family separation, nongovernment emails and government-owned aircraft for personal travel — will be those that Chaffetz and Gowdy jointly sent with him over the past two years and that the administration largely ignored.
At the time, Cummings counseled his Republican colleagues to put aside the politics of the moment and to retrieve long-term. "I get in these guys' ears, and I talk to them centre to centre," Cummings says. "I told them, 'Trump is 72. I'm 67. You lot all are still young guys. Why are you trying to carry this guy's water? After he'south dead, you lot're going to be living with this [curse].' "
Congress'south oversight responsibilities originated from an incident on Nov. iv, 1791, when a one,400-soldier war machine trek led by Arthur St. Clair, then governor of the Northwest Territory and a quondam general officer in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, was routed in what is now Ohio by a confederacy of warriors from 3 Native American tribes. Nearly 700 soldiers were killed and 300 wounded. The House of Representatives established a select committee to investigate the defeat and authorized it to "telephone call for such persons, papers and records as may be necessary to aid their inquiries." President George Washington was initially concerned that Congress had overstepped its bounds. But after Washington'southward cabinet — including Secretary of Land Thomas Jefferson and Treasury Secretarial assistant Alexander Hamilton — unanimously counseled him otherwise, he agreed to cooperate with the investigation, turning over the documents that had been requested.
In the 226 years since the commission investigated — and ultimately absolved — St. Clair, Congress has performed its oversight and investigative functions with varying degrees of enthusiasm, competence and responsibility. For every Senate investigation into the Teapot Dome scandal — which brought down Albert Fall, Warren Harding's secretary of the interior, in 1923 for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from oil barons — in that location's Senator Joseph McCarthy's use of his chairmanship of the Committee on Government Operations in the 1950s to search for Communists in the regime.
In the decades afterward Watergate, both the Senate and the House conducted rigorous, and bipartisan, investigations into topics including intelligence-agency abuses and war machine-procurement fraud, producing meaningful reforms in the process. That heyday came to an end, however, when Republicans took dorsum the House in 1995, giving them control of it for the kickoff time in 40 years. Once Newt Gingrich was installed equally House speaker, he merged several Business firm committees with responsibilities to monitor authorities agencies into a single panel, naming it the Regime Reform and Oversight Committee.
The new committee had the broadest oversight jurisdiction of any in Congress — a power Gingrich quickly weaponized against the Clinton administration. He filled over half the G.O.P.'s committee seats with freshmen who arrived on the wave of his Republican revolution, and in 1997 made Representative Dan Burton of Indiana its chairman. An ardent Clinton foe, Burton had already proposed investigating the suicide of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster — Burton infamously conducted amateur forensics tests, reportedly by shooting melons in his lawn — and how much coin the White Business firm was spending on postage stamp to reply to letters that children had written to the Clintons' pet cat, Socks.
In his six years as chairman, Burton issued more than 1,000 unilateral subpoenas and demanded everything downwardly to the White Firm vacation-card listing. Just his Javert act ultimately became too much even for Republicans. For all his exertions, Burton proved unable to find concrete bear witness of serious wrongdoing on the function of the Clinton assistants. He repeatedly undermined himself, as in 1998 when one of his pinnacle aides — Trump's future deputy campaign manager David Bossie — released transcripts of the jailhouse phone conversations of Hillary Clinton'due south old law partner and former Acquaintance Attorney General Webb Hubbell, who was bedevilled of fraud for overbilling clients, that seemed to implicate Clinton in the overbilling. Democrats afterward showed that the transcripts had been misleadingly edited, and Bossie was pressured to resign. "Nosotros'd only put our human foot out," recalls Henry Waxman, who was the top Democrat on the committee during Burton's chairmanship, "and he'd trip over it." Gingrich eventually stopped giving sensitive investigative assignments to Burton's Oversight Committee.
In 2003, Tom Davis took over as the Oversight Committee chairman and established what became the standard manner of depression-central defence when the chairman's own party is in the White House. "I had to show the party flag," Davis says of fighting off some Democratic demands for investigations of the Bush-league administration. But when information technology came to large problems — similar the Bush administration's slow and poorly executed response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff'south contacts with President Bush and other White House officials — Davis, much to the consternation of some of his fellow Republicans, led rigorous investigations. "He had a concern most oversight," Waxman says, "and he thought the questions nosotros wanted to pursue were legitimate and worthwhile."
Later on Democrats took back the House in the 2006 midterms, Waxman became Oversight Committee chairman. He was an aggressive but careful investigator; unlike Burton, he didn't initiate an inquiry at the commencement whiff of scandal, nor did he succumb to some of his Democratic constituents' blood lust. "I'd go to some of the Democratic clubs dorsum home, and people would say, 'Why haven't y'all imprisoned George Westward. Bush?' " Waxman recalls. "I had to tell them nosotros don't have the power to imprison people. There was a widespread belief that there's a prison correct there in the Capitol."
Merely Waxman'due south investigations into the failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, profiteering by the military contractor Blackwater and the Federal Emergency Management Agency'southward unsafe policy of housing families displaced by Hurricane Katrina in trailers with unhealthful levels of formaldehyde, among others, harked back to the heyday of post-Watergate oversight. His hearings calling executives from A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers to testify about their role in the 2008 financial crisis helped lay the groundwork for Congress's near substantial effort in decades to rein in the financial sector, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Human activity.
One of Waxman's nigh trusted lieutenants on the Oversight Committee was Cummings, who proved so proficient at political theater that Waxman and his staff oft relied on him to enquire the almost crucial questions of hostile witnesses testifying before the committee. Fifty-fifty today, Oversight veterans speak in awed tones about a 2007 hearing when Cummings questioned the Country Department's inspector general, Howard Krongard, about claims that he impeded a federal investigation into Blackwater. During testimony, Cummings informed Krongard that commission staff had discovered that Krongard's brother was at a Blackwater advisory lath meeting in Williamsburg, Va.: "This meeting is taking place right at present," Cummings said, "as we speak." Krongard resigned from the State Section a few weeks later. "It was like a Perry Mason moment," Waxman says.
During their years in the minority, Cummings and his roughly 35-person committee staff, led by its director, David Rapallo, became skilled at conducting investigations without much political or legal leverage. In 2017, a Democratic investigator for the Oversight Commission, scrutinizing Michael Flynn, Trump's kickoff national-security adviser, reviewed Flynn's 2016 security clearance renewal application and noticed that Flynn took a trip to Kingdom of saudi arabia in 2015 — during which he claimed to stay at a hotel that did non exist and to attend a briefing that did not occur. Robert Mueller went on to investigate Flynn'due south suspected efforts to broker a $100 billion energy deal between Kingdom of saudi arabia and Russian federation's nuclear-ability bureau.
Epitome
Combing through the unpublished supporting evidence of an inspector general's report, Democratic committee staff establish 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 Artery, where it currently sits across from the Trump Hotel — a reversal that would benefit his hotel by preventing commercial developers from building a competing holding across the street. "The Cummings people did a lot of swell investigative work without formal tools," says Phil Barnett, who was the staff director of the Oversight Committee under Waxman. "At present they will take 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 Autonomous representatives who worked previously every bit prosecutors: Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts, Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland and Eric Swalwell of California. Pelosi told the grouping that they shouldn't take the result of the midterms for granted. At the same fourth dimension, she said, the Democrats needed to begin thinking about how they would conduct oversight of the Trump assistants — and the strategizing needed to start now.
Like Cummings, Nadler and Schiff chafed at their committees' Republican chairmen'due south lack of interest and outright interference during the Trump presidency. Mueller'south investigators have spent months building an increasingly sweeping instance most Russian meddling in the 2016 elections, implicating and indicting several of Trump'southward closest associates to engagement. But under the chairmanship of the Republican Devin Nunes of California, the Firm Intelligence Committee — which has a clear constitutional authority to conduct some of the same investigatory work as Mueller — produced a study that breezily ended that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government and that, contrary to the official consensus of the American intelligence customs, the Russian government was not even seeking to assist elect Trump. Commission Democrats said they were shut out of the drafting procedure 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 actively sought to thwart exactly the kind of oversight the committee was supposed to be doing. "I think that the mission for the chairman has been protecting the White Business firm, protecting the president and furthering a political narrative which is completely at odds with the facts," Schiff told me.
When Clearing and Community Enforcement, post-obit a new and unprecedented Trump administration policy, separated more 2,300 immigrant children from their families at the Southern border this spring, the Republican-led Judiciary Commission did not hold a single oversight hearing for Homeland Security Secretarial assistant Kirstjen Nielsen, whose bureau falls under the committee's oversight jurisdiction. Other committees, too, had their own lists of Trump-administration oversight oversights: the Natural Resource Committee's lack of involvement in Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's suspected ethical and managerial misdeeds, which accept been the bailiwick of at least 17 federal investigations, for example; 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' wellness care records. "The oversight task, later ii 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'due south 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'southward also the potential for lark. "The question is, do you want to be the Breaking News Commission that just investigates the effect 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 sectionalization of labor — began to take shape.
Schiff, the incoming Intelligence Commission chairman, will play a major role. I of his elevation priorities will exist protecting — and assisting — Mueller's investigation, and one of his commencement acts in the new Congress volition be trying to get to the bottom of 1 of the more tantalizing mysteries of the whole Russia affair: Whom did Donald Trump Jr. speak to on his phone in between calls setting upward the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians peddling clay 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.'due south cellular provider for the blocked number. "That phone call may lead to a place the Republicans didn't want to go," Schiff says, "and then they were unwilling to go the respond." Schiff wants the reply and will press the provider for it.
Nunes'due south investigation may not have produced much, but under his leadership, the committee did bear hundreds of hours of interviews: with Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Roger Rock and other key figures in the Russia affair. On Nunes'south orders, almost all the transcripts have remained in the sole possession of the committee, which has, amidst other things, kept them out of the easily of Mueller's investigators. Schiff plans to publicly release the remaining transcripts when the new Congress convenes in January.
In November, Michael Cohen, Trump'due south erstwhile lawyer, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about a Moscow existent estate project Trump pursued. Cohen was defenseless by Mueller'due south investigators only considering he publicly released his opening argument to the Intelligence Committee. Referring to the unreleased transcripts, Swalwell told me: "I merely wonder how many more crimes are just sitting in the basement of the House Intelligence Commission that Mueller doesn't know nearly because he hasn't seen that they lied to united states of america."
Schiff is also interested in examining Trump'due south business organization dealings — including whether Russians laundered coin through the Trump Organization — from a counterintelligence perspective. "What would be most compromising to our nation and our national security is if a hostile strange ability has leverage over the president of the The states," Schiff told me. Or every bit the senior Democratic Intelligence Committee official says: "Whenever Putin is alone in a room with Trump with just the two of them and their translators, like they were in Helsinki, is Putin reminding him that he has an Excel spreadsheet of how many rubles are parked in Trump Tower?"
One afternoon in late Nov, Nadler, the incoming Judiciary Commission chairman, was in his congressional office. The walls were bare, save some exposed nails. All the pictures and framed bills that once hung on them were piled in a plastic-lined dumpster in the reception area — "Jerry's bucket of achievements," Daniel Schwarz, Nadler's communications managing director, joked. Nadler was in the process of moving to a infinite closer to the Judiciary Committee'south offices.
The congressman from the Upper West Side became the meridian Democrat on the committee in December 2017 later John Conyers, the long-serving Michigan representative, resigned from Congress over sexual-harassment claims. Nadler has been a Trump bête noire since the 1980s, when, as an assemblyman, he fought to foreclose Trump from building a proposed 150-story edifice in his commune, where Trump hoped to live in an apartment on the acme floor. Later his election to Congress in 1992, Nadler fabricated certain Trump didn't receive federal mortgage guarantees for the project. "I didn't want him to be the tallest man in the globe there," Nadler told me. Trump described Nadler in his 2000 book, "The America We Deserve," as "one of the most egregious hacks in contemporary politics."
The Judiciary Committee is endowed with the authority to get-go impeachment proceedings confronting a president, as committee Republicans did confronting Bill Clinton in 1998, and equally committee Democrats did against Nixon in 1973. Nadler is thus probably the committee chairman most likely to notice himself defenseless between the expectations of the Democratic base and the political and institutional realities their representatives are now subject to.
"If they're successful at doing their jobs, then they'll bring forth more information well-nigh Trump's wrongdoing, and the logical determination will be impeachment," says Kevin Mack, lead strategist for the liberal billionaire Tom Steyer's group Need to Impeach, which has gathered nearly vi.5 meg signatures supporting Trump's impeachment. And if Democrats don't impeach Trump? "What y'all're saying by not attempting to stand up up for the rule of law is that the rule of police force is not the almost important affair to you," Steyer told me. "Complaining about something is non doing something near it."
When Nadler ran to succeed Conyers equally the tiptop Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, his pitch included a leaflet he wrote and distributed to his beau Democrats, which said that he was "our strongest member to lead a potential impeachment." Since clinching the chairmanship, however, Nadler has go much more circumspect, at to the lowest degree publicly, nearly 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 desire to brainstorm impeachment proceedings but if he believes that, by the end of the process, there would be an "appreciable fraction of the Trump voters" who back up Trump's impeachment.
"You lot don't desire to tear the country apart," Nadler said. "You don't want a situation where for the next thirty years half the country is proverb, 'We won the election; you stole it from the states.' " He added an interesting caveat, however: "Now notice I didn't say an appreciable fraction of Republican senators. It's the Trump voters. Considering it might be — I'thousand non maxim it is, but it might be — that the Republican Party becomes and then ane-sided, or such a cult group in consequence, 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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Still, every bit he sabbatum in his elimination part, Nadler did non audio like someone eager to atomic number 82 a potential impeachment. "The fact that you notice impeachable offenses and the fact that you think you can prove impeachable offenses," he said, "doesn't necessarily mean the offenses rise to the level of importance where y'all should impeach." When I spoke to Nadler a couple of weeks later, later federal prosecutors said that Trump directed Michael Cohen to make payments in violation of campaign-finance laws to squelch a sex scandal, he still sounded cautious. "I don't think things take changed, actually," Nadler said. "We know a little more, merely at that place'south a lot more than to know."
In the days after the election, Nadler began firing off "preservation messages" to the White House, the Justice Section and other agencies alert them that "concealing, removing or destroying" any documents related to Jeff Sessions's firing or Mueller'south investigation "may plant a crime." In January, the committee's first society of business, Nadler said, will exist to telephone call Matthew Whitaker, the interim attorney general, to testify; Whitaker, who has a sparse legal résumé, was tapped by Trump to replace Sessions and volition hold the chore until the official nominee for attorney general, William Barr, is confirmed by the Senate. From the moment Whitaker was appointed, Nadler told me, "Information technology was clear that Trump wanted him to exist his hatchet man." When Whitaker comes before the committee, Nadler said, he will enquire him: "Have you told Mueller non to follow some line of enquiry? Have you told him not to indict somebody? What instructions have you given to him, if whatsoever? Have yous communicated with the White Firm about these matters in any way or with the president's lawyers in any way? What have you told them? Those kinds of questions."
Nadler'south to-do list goes far beyond Whitaker. In that location is the Justice Department'southward conclusion not to defend the Affordable Care Human action in a lawsuit brought by Republican state attorneys general; the Trump administration'southward family-separation policy; whether the White House improperly interfered with the F.B.I.'s groundwork check into Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
"In the last two years, the Republicans in Congress, their basic thought has been: Permit the Trump assistants practise what it wants, let in that location be no oversight," Nadler said. In a normal presidency, this would take been problematic, simply with Trump in the White House, Nadler argued, "at that place are real challenges to the democratic norms that we haven't seen the likes of since the Civil State of war." The event, he said, is that "we have a real crisis now."
On the last Th in November, the House Oversight Commission held what was nearly likely its final hearing of the year, and Cummings'south final hearing as the ranking member. It was devoted to the 2017 hurricane season and the Trump assistants's response to Hurricane Maria, and Cummings believed it was long overdue. He initially asked Gowdy to concur hearings on the matter dorsum in September 2017, nine days after Maria devastated Puerto Rico. Gowdy refused and continued to reject requests for a hearing for more a year. Now Gowdy had finally scheduled the hearing in the lame-duck session on a day Democrats were holding their leadership elections. As a result, when the hearing began, only half-dozen of the commission'southward 41 members were present.
"Our Republican colleagues take promised to accommodate usa, and I appreciate it," Cummings said when it was his turn to speak, "but they would not move the hearing to a different day, and they would not even motility up the start time by xxx minutes and then we could ask Administrator Long our questions." He was referring to the caput of FEMA, Brock Long, who was testifying that 24-hour interval. He lit into Gowdy. "I greatly respect the chairman, as a person, as an chaser and as a friend, but this is not transparency, this is non accountability and this is certainly not oversight."
If Cummings is perceptive of the tactics being used against him to defend a president, it's considering, not so long agone, he was the one doing the protecting. He became the top Democrat on the committee when Republicans took dorsum the Business firm in the 2010 midterms, and the new chairman, Darrell Issa, promised to hold hundreds of hearings into the Obama assistants. Cummings was the first line of defence force against the coming investigative onslaught. "Mr. Cummings was very smart and deliberate and methodical, and was a perfect foil to Darrell," says Kurt Bardella, Issa'southward onetime spokesman and after a spokesman for Breitbart, who last twelvemonth renounced the G.O.P. and became a Democrat. Cummings batted back Republicans' most incendiary charges against Obama by pointing to the lack of any real evidence, and repeatedly provoked Issa into own goals, like the fourth dimension Issa received negative coverage for ordering Cummings's microphone cut off when Cummings tried to make a argument at the terminate of a hearing.
Cummings proved a similarly effective opponent to Gowdy on the special commission investigating the 2012 attack on the U.s. mission in Benghazi, Libya — which Gowdy led and on which Cummings was the top Democrat — and then to Chaffetz, who succeeded Issa as Oversight Committee chairman. Cummings's friends are quick to betoken out that Issa, Chaffetz and Gowdy will non be serving in the next Congress. "They all quit after having to deal with Elijah!" Waxman says.
"Darrell pursued headlines," Bardella told me. "He wanted visibility and publicity." During the Trump presidency, he argues, "Cummings can focus on substance, and the reality is, they have and then much more to work with on substance than nosotros did. Our approach was, there could exist corruption, there could be waste material, fraud and abuse. We already know those things exist with Trump. At that place'due south no fishing trek required."
And however, those Obama-era investigations fabricated an indelible marker on politics. Congressional Republicans may never accept been able to show that Obama'due south I.R.Due south. unfairly singled out Tea Party groups for scrutiny; or that Eric Holder tried to hide the facts about a failed Justice Department investigation into gunrunning along the Mexican border, called Fast and Furious, that resulted in the expiry of a Border Patrol amanuensis; or that Hillary Clinton, as secretarial assistant of country, tried to encompass upward a bungled response to the Benghazi attack — only you might non know this if you spend much time on conservative media or the Trump rally circuit.
Burton'south probing of the Clinton administration occurred in the old-media landscape of the 1990s, when the expectations of the press — and of the public — were that for a congressional investigation to exist considered successful, it needed to produce the factual goods. Just Issa and his successors, past virtue of right-wing-media megaphones like Trick News (which was in its infancy during the Clinton years) and Breitbart, were able to behave investigations equally a kind of mail-truth theater, where proving charges was less important than making them, loudly and repeatedly. By the time of the 2016 presidential entrada, a Fairleigh Dickinson University survey plant that 44 percent of Republicans and a full half of Trump supporters believed it was "definitely true" that "as secretary of country, Hillary Clinton knew the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi was going to be attacked and did nothing to protect it."
The claiming of conducting oversight in this post-truth political environs is not lost on Cummings and other Democrats. "I spotter Pull a fast one on News every now then," Cummings told me, "and the reason why I watch Flim-flam News is, I'm trying to see how they tin can twist things around and brand them sound so like the Democrats have some conspiracy against the president — and they exercise a adept job of it." Democrats worry about what will happen if they plough up concrete evidence of presidential wrongdoing in their investigations and a sizable portion of the electorate simply refuses to believe it.
It's besides very likely that Trump, having already broken so many other norms, will have few qualms most breaking the norm of cooperating, or even feigning cooperation, with congressional investigations. "If the president treats the Congress the way he has Bob Mueller, we can wait the administration to answer to many of our requests with stonewalling and invective," Schiff says. "It's very possible the assistants volition decide they're not going to compromise on anything, and litigate everything." David Bossie, the Dan Burton adjutant who stepped down for misleadingly editing and releasing the Hubbell transcripts, remains an informal adviser to Trump; he has gone then far equally to advise in a recent interview with Jacqueline Alemany of The Washington Postal service that the White Firm should encourage people subpoenaed by Business firm Democrats to plead the 5th or even flee the state. Congressional Republicans have too sent a message by picking Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, perhaps Trump's most staunch and outspoken defender on Capitol Hill, to serve as the peak Republican on the Oversight Commission. "When the caucus picked Hashemite kingdom of jordan," Tom Davis says, "they really picked confrontation."
The most disheartening prospect for Democrats is what that confrontation could ultimately reveal: but how little leverage — political and legal — a divided Congress has in a fight with a president similar Trump. If Trump assistants officials refuse to comply with subpoenas, Democrats could vote to agree them in contempt of Congress. But that's a largely toothless gesture. Even if the Firm does succumb to the Democratic base's desire and impeaches Trump, the One thousand.O.P.-controlled Senate would about certainly never convict. What'south more than, impeachment could backfire. "You don't desire to reward an offender similar the president with martyrdom," Eric Swalwell, who's currently exploring his own presidential run in 2020, told me. "That would exist the worst outcome — that he gets more pop, that his base grows considering of it."
Surveying the task ahead of him, Cummings says, "This volition be one of the hardest things I've ever washed." On a contempo afternoon, he sat in his congressional role and contemplated the possibility that he'd fall brusk. In the past year and a one-half, Cummings was hospitalized for nearly v months because of a serious knee infection and complications from a heart-valve replacement. "My saddest thought," he said, "is that at that place volition be harm done which will not be corrected during my lifetime and perhaps for a long time."
Democrats realize that they'll accept to wage their boxing in the court of public stance — and Cummings believes that will require somewhen winning over at to the lowest degree some of his Republican colleagues to his side. "At that place is ane incentive for them: love of land and democracy," he said. "We have to try to aid them get there. We take to try to help their constituents meet what they're doing and what they're not doing and try to bring them back to some sense of normalcy."
Seated at the top of the dais in the Oversight Commission hearing room at the sparsely attended hearings into Hurricane Maria last month, Cummings tried to get a head start on doing just that. He noted how FEMA hadn't been responsive to his entreaties for data over the final two years. He told Long, the FEMA caput, that his attitude would have to alter and that he expected answers to a new a batch of questions before the finish of the year — after which Cummings would be the i holding the gavel.
"I guarantee you, Administrator Long," Cummings said, raising his paw and pointing a long, knobby finger, "this hearing volition not be your concluding before this committee."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/magazine/democrats-trump-investigation.html
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