There’s an army of experts who could be tapped to investigate Trump’s corruption. But right now, they’re sitting on the sidelines.
Even MAGA House Speaker Mike Johnson concedes the investigations are coming. He’s apparently so afraid of what happens if Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress that he’s already promised his members a “protection program” for when the subpoenas arrive, which tells you the Speaker very much expects them to arrive.
That’s what most jumped out to me from Rolling Stone’s report over the weekend on how Democrats are preparing to investigate Trump if they retake Congress on November 3. Republicans are scared. Democrats on key committees are drawing up plans that run from Trump’s billion-dollar ballroom and his monument arch to the weaponization of federal law enforcement.
Speaker Johnson even told a gathering of conservatives earlier this year that “impeachment isn’t even the real concern.” Instead, he warned that half of them in the room would be targeted. Accordingly, Johnson pledged he’d take care of his GOP colleagues, and his office is reportedly running oversight briefings for nervous Republicans, PowerPoint included.
I’m glad they’re running scared. They should be. But in my experience leading investigations on Capitol Hill, a subpoena is only as useful as the person who knows what to do with it. Unfortunately, there’s a problem right now that no one’s addressed. We don’t have investigators on the job who can handle these sprawling probes. Donald Trump spent the past twenty-one months dismantling the government’s own capacity to investigate him, and Congress has nowhere near that capability either. At least not yet.
Within days of taking office, Trump set about to gut the organs of government that might open probes into his wrongdoing. For starters, the Justice Department fired the prosecutors who had worked for Jack Smith on the Trump classified documents case and on the president’s effort to steal the 2020 election. Then, the Public Integrity Section (the Watergate-era unit that handled corruption cases involving public officials) was cut from about 30 prosecutors to roughly five and stripped of its power to bring cases at all. By this spring, one in five Justice Department lawyers overall had quit or been pushed out, and the president called it “a very good thing.”
Over at the FBI, Kash Patel has been on a mission to make sure all major investigations flow through him, and the message has been very clear. Ex-agents tell me that any whiff of a possible inquiry into Trump or the corruption of his associates isn’t tolerated. Meanwhile, agents who had touched the previous Trump investigations have been fired in waves, dozens of them, along with the officials who tried to protect those FBI employees who’d simply been doing their jobs. Patel also disbanded the elite unit that investigates public corruption, even going on Fox News to brag about it.
“You’re darn right I fired those agents,” Patel gloated. “You’re darn right I blew up CR-15, the public corruption squad, that led the weaponization at the Washington Field Office.”
See the point? Almost anyone who’s ever been assigned to a case involving Trump’s misconduct, or who ran a unit that might someday open one, is gone. The old adage that “no one is above the law” assumes that there’s always someone looking. But if you blindfold the people whose job it is to keep their eyes peeled, then the adage becomes a cruel joke, right?
I’ve spent the past several weeks talking with many of these former prosecutors and agents, some of them on camera for CORRUPTIONLAND, the documentary we’re releasing next week. They were pushed out for doing their jobs, and almost every one of them told me some version of the same thing: if there were a serious, well-run effort to hold this administration accountable, they’d step back into the fight tomorrow.
Congress should take them up on it. If the opposition wins the House or the Senate, the new committee chairs should hire these investigators and put them to work. Right away.
I say that with real affection for the people already on the Hill, because I was once a young Capitol Hill staffer. Hell, I started up there when I was 16 years old as a Congressional Page. And I know the young people staffing those committees today are smart and underpaid and overworked. That’s also what worries me. The majority are in their twenties or early thirties, and most of them have never run a document review, flipped a witness, traced a wire transfer, or built a case to withstand judicial scrutiny. That’s not a knock on them; it’s just the reality that most staffers have been hired to answer phone calls and write press releases, rather than probe the most corrupt administration in American history.
So this cannot be business as usual.
If Democrats take the House or Senate, they’ll need to bring in the big guns. That means making serious budget decisions to hire outside talent capable of extensive investigations into obviously illegal acts, unconstitutional conduct, self-enrichment, and presidential revenge. There’s recent precedent, of course. The January 6th committee hired a former U.S. attorney to lead its investigation and staffed it with career prosecutors, and the result was the most thorough congressional investigation in a generation. The next Congress should do that again — at ten times the scale — with the people Trump fired for being the best of the best corruption fighters.
The president spent two years making sure no one inside the government could investigate him. It will backfire. Because Congress may soon have leaders willing to put them all back on the case.
Your friend, in defiance,
P.S. DEFIANCE.org is a nonprofit “club for the courageous.” We literally exist to FIGHT the corruption you just read about. We announce a new effort every week to counter Trump’s abuses of power. That’s what your membership funds. If you haven’t yet, become a member today.
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