Some House Democrats are already looking at the possibility of investigating former President Donald Trump if they win the House majority in November.
Two top lawmakers, Reps. Richard Neal, D-Mass., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., did not rule out probing Trump if he won the White House in November.
Neal, the top Democrat on the House Ways & Means Committee who led the probe into Trump’s tax returns in the last Congress, told Fox News Digital it would be “hard to assess” whether he would see himself resuscitating that effort, but he added that the Supreme Court’s recent decision expanding presidential immunity could change the calculus.
“That would be speculative, but I certainly would not back away from the positions I’ve taken over the years on that issue,” Neal said.
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Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told Fox News Digital, “I’d rather look to the future than the past, but we’ll do our job.”
In a longer statement provided to Fox News Digital on Wednesday, Raskin accused Republicans of ignoring issues like gun violence and prescription drug costs.
“Instead, for two years, House Republicans have used the gavel to pursue a laughingstock flop of an impeachment investigation to help their presidential nominee and personal cult leader, Donald Trump. Even worse, they have blocked and obstructed Democrats’ efforts to investigate the corruption of Donald Trump and his autocrat allies,” Raskin said.
“Investigating this endless corruption is critical for Congress to create legislative fixes to ensure government serves the people and to put an end to efforts to exploit the presidency and sell out our government to the highest bidder.”
Meanwhile, rank-and-file Democratic Reps. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., said investigations could be warranted into Trump’s family and their business dealings even if the former president lost his re-election bid.
Both singled out his son-in-law and former White House adviser Jared Kushner, whose investment firm got a $2 billion investment commitment from a fund led by Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
“His family has some ongoing deals that we learned about after we went out of the majority that I think are worth visiting,” Swalwell said. “The Kushners and the Saudi deal – I think people want some closure on that.”
He took a shot at the House GOP’s probes into the foreign business dealings of President Biden’s son, adding, “If you tell me you’re interested in Hunter Biden, then you probably owe it to the country to be interested in what happened there.”
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Goldman, an Oversight Committee member, told Fox News Digital, “I think if Trump wins, obviously that’ll be the principal purpose [of the committee], is to provide the checks and balances that Congress needs to check, and that Donald Trump especially requires.”
“I think there are a lot of really important, substantive issues that the committee has not investigated this year that are not partisan, that we should be focused on,” he said, adding, “But we also were frustrated this term that obvious, obvious concerns were not investigated.”
“How did Jared Kushner get $2 billion from Mohammed bin Salman for an investment company in something that he had never done before…That’s a tremendous amount of money. There’s been no investigation into that.”
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Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt responded, “Swalwell and Goldman should get a life. President Trump has endured two fake impeachments, four baseless witch-hunt indictments, and endless investigations into his businesses — all of which have failed because they are not based on facts but rather, they are fueled by the vitriolic Trump Derangement Syndrome that has taken over the Democrat Party.”
Raskin’s investigatory efforts into Trump during this Congress, as leader of the Oversight Committee’s Democratic minority, could also offer a possible preview of what Democrats’ probes could look like in a second Trump term.
Earlier this month, he and Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., sent a letter to Trump demanding that the former president prove he did not take a “cash bribe” from Egypt’s president in 2017. The letter was spurred by a Washington Post report that also alleged former Attorney General Bill Barr had blocked a probe into the matter.
Investigating Biden and his family has been a core focus of the committee under Chairman James Comer’s tenure. Comer, R-Ky., released a report recently accusing the president of having committed impeachable offenses – something the White House denies.
He denied that the intensity of his Biden probe could give Democrats cover to investigate Trump, however – insisting their inquiries into Trump were political.
“If the Democrats want to waste taxpayer dollars and time investigating the Trump administration again for the second time, then that’s their prerogative. But we focused on waste, fraud and abuse and mismanagement by the federal government,” Comer told Fox News Digital.
“If Trump wins…They’re going to harass and obstruct every step of the way.”
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