The White House’s top lawyer has warned the Democrat in line to lead the House’s chief investigative committee that aggressive oversight of the Trump administration “may cross the line into blatant criminality,” a threat that experts called legally dubious.
In a three-page letter to Representative Robert Garcia of California, the incoming chairman of the Oversight Committee, the White House counsel, Will Scharf, said Democrats had “evinced a clear intent to transgress” constitutional limits on congressional investigations. He predicted that their inquiries would be used “to harass and aggrandize, rather than to advance any legitimate legislative end.”
The warning from the White House was dated Monday, a day after Attorney General Todd Blanche said on CNN that members of Congress had “done nothing but threaten everything that’s happening in this administration.”
“That is not governing, that is not leading, that is not oversight,” Mr. Blanche said. He, like Mr. Scharf, once represented Mr. Trump as a defense lawyer.
Taken together, their statements signal that Mr. Trump’s administration is likely to follow the playbook his first administration used after Democrats took the House in 2019. Then, Mr. Trump vowed to fight “all” subpoenashis administration routinely refused to comply and the disputes ended up in court.
Source: www.nytimes.com
