Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,58
outdone, Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, issued more than eighty subpoenas in March 2019, all seeking information targeting President Trump. Will either of them pull back because it’s an election year? To the contrary. But back in 2012, Cummings called the Fast and Furious investigation “an election-year witch hunt,” even as he acknowledged that the investigation into the botched government gunrunning operation “uncovered a pattern of problems.”
Thus far, the Democrats can only wish the results of the election-year witch hunt into President Trump had produced as much evidence of wrongdoing as that Fast and Furious investigation did. Even the vaunted special counsel investigation turned up less substantive evidence of wrongdoing than we found in just that one Obama-era investigation of the gun-walking scandal. It’s safe to say Democrat committee chairmen appear to have overcome their objections to witch hunts, fishing expeditions, and obsessive investigations.
Crying Wolf: False Investigations
Further undercutting the credibility of legislative branch oversight is the pursuit of false claims and meritless investigations. It doesn’t take many to convince the public that oversight is not credible.
We all saw what happened when the Justice Department announced prior to the release of the Mueller Report that there would be no indictments of Trump campaign operatives for Russian collusion. This came as an obvious shock to anyone who had been listening to Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s assurances over the previous year. He had seen the evidence himself, so he said. Even after the vast resources of the special counsel had exhausted every possible lead and come up empty, Schiff continued to insist the Mueller investigation had gotten it wrong. Schiff has indicated this is a hill he’s willing to die on, undermining the legitimacy of the congressional oversight he oversees. The price is one he (and we) may have to pay.
The staff of the House Oversight Committee is fewer than one hundred people. Other committees are even smaller. The resources are simply not sufficient to pursue every potential investigative lead. That means the chairman has to pick his battles. Schiff has proven he’ll choose the battle with Donald Trump every time. There is no rumor too speculative, no allegation too unfounded to attract the attention of the many committees itching to investigate the Trump presidency.
Before Donald J. Trump was even sworn in as America’s forty-fifth president, Democrats began demanding that the Oversight Committee do to Donald Trump what they perceived we had done to Hillary Clinton. In their view, our attempts to investigate her email server during a presidential campaign were a political stunt. They wanted similar “stunts” aimed at Donald Trump.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle had tremendous faith that there would be evidence—if we would just search for it. But when I did open investigations, there was nothing there. In the months before I left Congress, we opened several investigations into allegations Democrats made against Donald Trump.
For example, just a month after President Trump’s inauguration, various outlets reported on a photo posted to social media by a member at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida showing the president, top aides, and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe looking at a computer screen. The New York Times alleged, “President Trump and his top aides coordinated their response to North Korea’s missile test on Saturday night in full view of diners at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida—a remarkable public display of presidential activity that is almost always conducted in highly secure settings.”
The social media post had not mentioned the North Korean missile test, but the article drew the conclusion based on the fact that shortly before the photo was posted, North Korea had test-fired a ballistic missile from its coast. Other outlets claimed cell phone lights had been pointed at sensitive documents during the briefing in “full view of fellow diners.”
The story was widely picked up by news outlets around the world.
Immediately, Democrat politicians jumped on board to condemn the president, with Nancy Pelosi telling the Times, “There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater.” Senators Tom Udall and Sheldon Whitehouse said in a statement, “This is America’s foreign policy, not this week’s episode of ‘Saturday Night Live.’”
Unlike so many of the wild allegations against the new president, this one at least had a photo. On that basis, I went ahead and launched an investigation. The media covered that, too. What they didn’t seem to want to cover was the inconvenient result