Democrats won the House last week, and the president’s lawyers are already warning them that doing their jobs could land them in legal jeopardy. Congress investigating the executive branch is a constitutionally protected imperative. That didn’t stop the White House from preemptively lashing out, as The New York Times reports:
The White House’s top lawyer has warned the Democrat in line to lead the House’s chief investigative committee that aggressive oversight of the Trump administration “may cross the line into blatant criminality,” a threat that experts called legally dubious. In a three-page letter to Representative Robert Garcia of California, the incoming chairman of the Oversight Committee, the White House counsel, Will Scharf, said Democrats had “evinced a clear intent to transgress” constitutional limits on congressional investigations. He predicted that their inquiries would be used “to harass and aggrandize, rather than to advance any legitimate legislative end.” ... The warning from the White House was dated Monday, a day after Attorney General Todd Blanche said on CNN that members of Congress had “done nothing but threaten everything that’s happening in this administration.” ... He, like Mr. Scharf, once represented Mr. Trump as a defense lawyer.
Notice who’s doing the threatening: the president’s former defense lawyers, who now run the White House counsel’s office and the DOJ, warning off the very people who might investigate Trump. Much of Scharf’s letter is a catalog of Democrats’ postelection exuberance about finally being able to investigate the administration.
Scharf never explains how he’d get around the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which exists to shield lawmakers from exactly this kind of threat. Garcia’s office said it hadn’t even received the letter as of Wednesday, though the White House was happy to share it with reporters.
Hakeem Jeffries, likely the next speaker, had the right answer: “If they don’t like it, consult the Constitution.”
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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