By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, SEUNG MIN KIM and JOEY CAPPELLETTI Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House has issued a warning to Democrats over their planned probes into the Trump administration, going as far as claiming that such investigations — a standard oversight function of Congress — may amount to “blatant criminality.”
White House counsel Will Scharf issued the warning in a letter dated Monday to Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee.
Garcia most likely would chair the powerful panel in the new Democratic-controlled Congress that is seated in January. Garcia warned Trump officials to “lawyer up” as his party was on the way to stunning victories in last week’s midterm election.
In response, Scharf wrote that “threats to executive branch officials designed to deter them from public service, or process designed merely to abuse or instill fear in the recipient may cross the line into blatant criminality.” The letter’s existence was first reported by Punchbowl News.
It’s just the latest shot across the bow as the White House prepares to square off against newly empowered Democrats in the House and Senate next year, a showdown with major implications for congressional authority and the balance of power between the branches of government.
Garcia pushes back on the White House letter
Outside the Capitol on Wednesday, Garcia told reporters that “Donald Trump is clearly hiding something” and that Democrats “are not going to be threatened or intimidated.”
“The truth is that he needs to understand that Congress is a coequal branch of government,” Garcia said.
He doubled down on his “lawyer up” post after the election, saying the White House was “thin-skinned” and couldn’t “take any sort of heat.”
“If you have abused the American public, you should lawyer up,” Garcia said. “If you’re a corporate CEO and you’re ripping off the American people, you should lawyer up.”
Democrats are preparing a vast oversight agenda to look at how Trump and his family have become wealthier since he returned to office. The Republican president and his White House have long denied any wrongdoing.
Garcia also wants to look at the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. Other targets include Trump’s White House ballroom and other construction projects, as well as the Trump family’s role in mineral deals and Trump’s crypto dealings with special envoy Steve Witkoff.
The Republican chair of Oversight says the panel is ‘very independent’
Kentucky Republican James Comer, the current chair of the Oversight Committee who conducted a wide-ranging investigation of former President Joe Biden and his family, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he had not yet read the letter from the White House, but stressed that the panel is “very independent.”
“Regardless of who is in the White House, there’s always going to be a strong desire for the Oversight Committee to be a check and balance on the executive branch, regardless of the political scenario,” Comer said.
He said he thought Garcia’s “lawyer up” comments were in “bad taste” but Democrats “won the election and it’s going to be his committee. So if he gets out of line, I would assume that his members will try to rein him in.”
Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a CNN interview that aired Sunday that “there could be” a crime to investigate if rhetoric from Democrats turned threatening. He appeared to strike a more conciliatory tone during an appearance in Missouri this week, saying “Congress has oversight authority. It always has, it always will. The Department of Justice, the federal government, works with Congress to address questions they have — whether it’s through subpoenas or letters — so we’re not going to stop working with Congress.”
“Nothing I’ve said this weekend, or in the past, should suggest otherwise,” he added.
Still, Justice Department officials elsewhere were pushing back. Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Texas, wrote to Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal on Wednesday, telling him to preserve all records relevant to his investigations.
Blumenthal is poised to chair a powerful Senate investigative committee in January. Reitz called Blumenthal’s efforts an “intent to deprive citizens of their core constitutional rights,” pointing to his October letter to people who donated to the new White House ballroom.
Other lawmakers react to the White House’s warning
Outgoing Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Trump critic, said he hopes Democrats don’t squander their new powers on “stupid things.”
“I hope they have real hearings about real things, not another Russia-gate,” he said, referring to a previous congressional inquiry into ties between Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016 and Russia. Trump repeatedly denounced that investigation as a “hoax.”
“I think there is some real corruption there around the fringes,” Massie said about Trump and some of those around the president. Massie lost his primary election to a Trump-backed GOP challenger.
Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Calif., who is expected to be the next House Ethics Committee chairman, said he would not back down from any investigations because of warnings from the White House.
“If they’re trying to intimidate, at least for me, it’s not going to get me,” said DeSaulnier, who was a Republican before he switched to the Democratic Party in 2000. “I don’t work for a mafia, a mob organization.”
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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker and AP video journalist Nathan Ellgren contributed to this report.