Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,57
were wrong to defend the abusive expansion of that privilege by the Obama administration and they would be wrong to deny President Trump the legitimate use of it today. We have to be willing to consider what is best in the long term, regardless of which party is in power. I still believe the administration cannot claim executive privilege unless the chief executive was briefed. But neither can we afford to risk destroying the protection that privilege provides.
Going Fishing for Evidence
Chairman Cummings, a longtime opponent of what he called congressional fishing expeditions, instituted another change to the committee that I never expected to see from him. In fact, he would have come unglued had I made the same change. Apparently Oversight Democrats are ready to put their waders on.
I have to bring you in on a little bit of insider baseball to show how Democrats hope to expand their capacity to fish through mountains of irrelevant testimony in an effort to find that one fish that can help build a damaging narrative against the president.
Here’s how it works. The committee will no longer defer to the wishes of witnesses or minority members to have a member of Congress present for depositions. That may not seem like a big deal, but let me show you what happens when they make that one small change.
For every public hearing you see on television, there can be numerous private depositions that take place as part of the fact-gathering process. In the past, the minority was consulted and had the right to request that a member of Congress be present at such depositions even though staff attorneys conducted them. Witnesses could also make such a request.
That rule meant depositions could only be conducted when Congress was in session, which limited the number of depositions that could be done. Sometimes the minority or the witness would waive that right, but I can assure you that Cummings, as ranking member, would have been very upset had we proposed such a rule change. The reason is that we could have fired up the accelerant on investigations of the Obama administration. Without a need to have a member of Congress on hand, we could have had staff doing depositions day and night, even when Congress was in recess. That rule limited the committee’s ability to go on broad fishing expeditions by interviewing an endless string of witnesses.
Members’ time is tight, between floor votes, legislative work, meetings with constituents and lobbyists, and the necessary evil of fund-raising. When a member is required to be present for a transcribed interview, the staff has to make sure that interview is going to be worthwhile. Without that requirement, Cummings’s staff will be able to go on extended fishing expeditions without any factual evidence that the witness has something relevant to share.
This practice also compromises the legitimacy of these interrogations. The committee’s members, not its staff, hold the constitutional authority to engage in this work. With no member present for transcribed interviews, constitutional legitimacy is in doubt. These congressional depositions carry great weight. They can also be expensive for the witness, potentially incurring significant travel costs and attorneys’ fees, not to mention damaging media attention.
For a public company, the news that the company has even been called in for a transcribed interview can have consequences as devastating as anything that might be revealed in the actual interview. With the considerable expansion of the committee’s scope, Cummings has theoretically empowered his staff to impose the functional equivalent of financial fines and penalties against anyone they believe does not sufficiently align with the Democrat agenda.
Ranking member Cummings once called the Benghazi investigation “an abusive effort” to “derail Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign” and called for Republicans to “end this taxpayer-funded fishing expedition.” (It wasn’t one, but more on that later.)
Nonetheless, Democrats’ aversion to taxpayer-funded fishing expeditions seems to have subsided. As Chairman Cummings told 60 Minutes in January, “we can look at anything” to get Donald Trump. That’s a far cry from 2016, when he complained in an Oversight Committee hearing on the IRS, “Unfortunately, Republicans have become obsessed with investigating any and every allegation relating to the IRS, no matter how small.” Sound familiar?
With the shoe firmly on the other foot, Cummings came out of the gate with fifty-one different requests for documents from the Trump administration and a long list of subpoena threats. Unless there is evidence of wrongdoing, Cummings’s investigations meet the very definition of the obsessive fishing expeditions he once condemned.
Not to be