When Corruption is the Norm, Oversight Becomes Illegal

By preemptively threatening Democrats investigating his Administration, Trump confesses to his own corruption.

Accused of corruption? The White House says just blame the other guy.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Donald Trump thinks the mere act of investigating him and his Administration could be illegal. In fact, yesterday we learned he had his lawyer send a letter to the next chair of the House Oversight Committee threatening retaliatory legal action against Democrats. White House Counsel Will Scharf wrote the following in a letter obtained by Punchbowl News:

“Beyond being inconsistent with the clear, well-recognized constitutional limitations on your investigative functions, 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.”

Forget the fact that Congress is a co-equal branch of government. Ignore for a second that the American people just swept in this historic majority because they were fed up with the blatant corruption of this Administration. Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and the rest of the White House goon squad don’t want to answer all these pesky questions. Not because they’re laser-focused on the issues, and not because they actually believe Democrats are overstepping. They simply think they’re above the law.

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Now, they’re laying the groundwork to avoid answering any questions, turning over any documents and providing any cooperation to questions ranging from ICE terrorizing communities, administration officials placing bets on impending military actions or simply how the President’s wealth exploded by billions while serving in office.

The White House counsel letter warns that Congressional investigations must have a “legislative purpose” to be legitimate. While technically correct, the fact that this administration is suggesting that everyone needs to play by the rules is laughable. This Administration finds new ways to shock us with their corruption almost daily. Republicans during the Biden Administration stretched the “legislative purpose” precedent so thin it was see-through. Think about the two years they spent concocting a sham impeachment case against Joe Biden, all because Trump wanted revenge.

So to turn around now and warn about the constitutional limits of congressional oversight is taking yet another page from the dictator’s playbook. Rules for thee, but not for me. Trump’s corruption is so normalized, so necessary to who he is and what he does, that he sees any attempt to curb his behavior as illegal.

It’s the reason he gets up in the morning: to enrich himself, to impose his image and his ego on the rest of us, and to avoid any consequences for his actions no matter the cost. They’re not even trying to claim that the President did nothing wrong. They’re saying that even asking questions is off limits.

The goal here is to delegitimize every avenue of inquiry and make everything the Democrats do come across as pure partisanship, a signal that Trump’s base and right-wing news outlets will surely amplify. That turns real investigations into typical DC insider nonsense that ordinary Americans can tune out.

Now, I think it’s absolutely fair to say that Democrats can’t go overboard and lose sight of their responsibilities, or constitutional obligations, in performing necessary oversight. The American people didn’t sign up for fishing expeditions or vanity hearings. It’s going to require a great deal of discipline and strategic thinking to structure these investigations to maximize their impact. That’s incredibly challenging because there’s so much corruption to choose from.

And we’ve seen this movie before. Every step we took on the January 6th Committee was decried as outside the limits of our Congressional authority (it wasn’t) or illegal (it definitely wasn’t). The President himself said that we should be jailed and we were sent death threats as a result of his public attacks.

Trump is trying to hide from oversight in his gold-plated palace. The job of Congress is to ask questions in spite of that.

People with nothing to hide showed up. People with plenty to hide called us illegitimate, ignored the subpoenas, and dared us to enforce them. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were both convicted of contempt of Congress and served time. The process was legal. That’s exactly why they were so desperate to discredit it.

So when I see the White House start throwing out these threats, it is eerily familiar. This time, though, we know how to fight back.

The good news is that it won’t work. Democrats have a clear mandate and there is bipartisan consensus and legal precedent that Congress has broad investigative authority. Perhaps this compels House and Senate Democrats to simply pursue a path of least resistance by going straight to issuing subpoenas. That will prompt the typical faux-outrage from the Republican minority, but they’ve forfeited any opportunity to claim the moral high ground. I’d support it.

It’s worth pointing out that the true audience for this letter likely isn’t House Democrats. This was made clear by the fact that every reporter in Washington seemed to have a copy of it before the incoming Chair of the committee had officially received it. This letter is also aimed at everyone who might be asked to testify: the career civil servants, the staffers, the officers, the former officials who get a subpoena and have to decide whether doing the right thing will cost them everything.

I watched witnesses weigh exactly that decision when testifying. There might be people working in the Trump Administration today thinking about coming forward. They’re thinking about the fact that telling the truth could cost them their jobs, their reputations, or even their safety. A letter like this, which is aimed at the person with a mortgage and a conscience, makes that choice even harder.

That’s why we can’t just gloss over this latest effort to chill dissent and make it harder for people to tell the truth. They want to make you tired, to make you believe it’s all just politics, and that nothing will ever come of any of it. Don’t give them that.

So here’s my question. Democrats are about to have a lot of tools and a limited amount of time. What do you think they should investigate first?

—Adam