Oversight is the biggest winner of the midterm elections

Oversight is the biggest winner of the midterm elections

Conor Friedersdorf writes:

Oversight is the winner of the 2018 midterms.

For two years, as the press documented suspicious activity in all realms of President Donald Trump’s life, many Americans wondered, “How corrupt is the president? How about his political allies, his business associates, his appointees, and the people who run his nonprofit foundation? Are they profiting off taxpayers or selling out the public interest?”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller afforded some hope of a partial answer. His investigation has so far ensnared Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Michael Flynn, with still more indictments or guilty pleas possible before it’s concluded. But Mueller has always been focused on probing foreign interference in the 2016 election, and elected Democrats could not fully probe Trump’s other activities so long as the GOP held all of Congress and offered cover to their leader.

“For the last two years, I have implored House Republicans to help us gather the facts about the crisis of corruption in the Trump administration,” a Democratic member of the Oversight Committee recently complained, citing 64 occasions when the GOP blocked subpoenas he sought to issue.

Voters changed all that Tuesday, giving Democrats a House majority and all the committee chairmanships and oversight tools that come with it. Now what?

Oversight Committee Democrats want private emails written by Ivanka Trump, Trump Organization documents pertaining to foreign payments, documents pertaining to sexual-assault allegations against Customs and Border Patrol employees, documents pertaining to putting a citizenship question on the 2020 census, a hearing to secure testimony from Steve Bannon, documents pertaining to allegations of political retaliation against the State Department, and much, much, much more. [Continue reading…]

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