FoxNews.com reports that
The incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee this week said that when the new Congress is seated in January, Democrats plan to scrutinize whether President Trump abused his authority by taking adverse action against retail giant Amazon and two of his bitter left-leaning media rivals: CNN and The Washington Post.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in an interview with “Axios on HBO” that he and his colleagues will employ committee subpoena powers — which are backed by the legal threat of contempt of Congress — to conduct the triple-threaded inquiry into Trump’s possible use of the “instruments of state power to punish the press.”
Specifically, Schiff charged that Trump “was secretly meeting with the postmaster [general] in an effort to browbeat” her into “raising postal rates on Amazon,” whose founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, separately owns The Washington Post.
“This appears to be an effort by the president to use the instruments of state power to punish Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post,” Schiff said in the interview.
The president signed an executive order earlier this year mandating a review of what he called the “unsustainable financial path” of the United States Postal Service (USPS). And he has reportedly met with Postmaster General Megan Brennan several times to push for hikes to the shipping rates paid by companies like Amazon, although there are no indications he did so to seek political payback.
Trump has long derided the political coverage at the Post, which is fiercely and relentlessly critical of the White House, as a lobbying tool for Bezos. Most recently, the White House has contradicted the Post’s unequivocal reporting that it had shared a “doctored” video of CNN reporter Jim Acosta making contact with a White House intern during a press conference last week, as a Buzzfeed analysis suggested the changes in the video could have resulted inadvertently from the conversion of the footage to the lower-fidelity .gif format commonly used on Twitter.
But Trump has also feuded specifically with Amazon throughout the year, saying it is taking advantage of taxpayer-subsidized shipping rates.
In March, he argued in a series of tweets that the online retailer’s “scam” shipping deal with the U.S. Postal Service is costing the agency “billions of dollars.”
While the U.S. Postal Service has lost money for 11 years, package delivery — which has been a bright spot for the service — is not the reason. Boosted by e-commerce, the Postal Service has experienced double-digit increases in revenue from delivering packages, but that hasn’t been enough to offset pension and health care costs as well as declines in first-class letters and marketing mail.
Schiff also raised the possibility that the Trump administration’s opposition to AT&T’s $85 billion takeover of Time Warner on antitrust grounds may have been motivated by the president’s animus toward CNN, whose parent company is Time Warner. Trump frequently claims that CNN spreads “fake news” and that when it does so, it is acting as the “enemy of the people.”
“We don’t know, for example, whether the effort to hold up the merger of the parent of CNN was a concern over antitrust, or whether this was an effort merely to punish CNN,” Schiff said, without offering evidence.
“It is very squarely within our responsibility to find out,” Schiff said. Along with incoming House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and other top Democrats, Schiff will have a mandate to serve a slew of subpoenas on the Trump administration.
But former GOP Judiciary Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, who is now a Fox News contributor, told Politico in October that Cummings and Schiff shouldn’t get their hopes up.
“If [North Carolina Rep.] Mark Meadows and [Ohio Rep.] Jim Jordan can’t get documents out of the White House, I don’t know why Elijah Cummings and the Democrats think they’ll do any better,” Chaffetz said.
Still, Democrats had signaled even before last week’s midterm elections that they would aggressively investigate the Trump administration if they took power in Congress. Bogging down the White House with burdensome document requests and subpoenas could indeed backfire, political analysts tell Fox News, but there is little doubt that the strategy — made more viable by heightened partisanship and loosened congressional norms — would impair Republicans’ messaging and even policy goals for the next two years.
“Well, we are responsible,” House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who is campaigning to reclaim her role as House speaker, said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “We are not scattershot. We are not doing any investigation for a political purpose, but to seek the truth. So I think a word that you could describe about how Democrats will go forward in this regard is we will be very strategic.”
But Pelosi has previously suggested that she would, indeed, use the threat of subpoena for political gain.
If you believe that the Democrats in the House will not start “investigating’ President Trump for political gain when they take over the leadership of the House of Representative in January, then you probably also believe that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a genius-level I.Q.
Dementia-riddled “San Fran Nan” Pelosi has been salivating for two years over the opportunity that she will have when she becomes next year’s Speaker of the House.
The Democrats have to be the most arrogant and stupid political party in history to believe that attacking a sitting president who has accomplished so much for the American people in so short a time will win them the approval of the average Americans between the two coasts who put him in office in the first place.
They do not seem to comprehend that it was their overestimation of their popularity which cost them the 2016 Presidential Election in the first place. Their anti-American policies and blatant political corruption, administrated with joyful glee for 8 long years by Barack Hussein Obama did nothing for Democrats except lose them the presidency by producing a visceral hatred of them by those Americans whom they continue to insult on a daily basis.
The Democrats have not been the party of the “working man” for decades. In fact, since the Far Left have taken over the party, they have become nothing but a conglomeration of special interest groups, drawn together by their desire to “radically change” America into a nation governed by adherents to the failed theories of Karl Marx.
The Democratic Party has done nothing since November of 2016 to attempt to calm down their minions such as the black-robed cowards of Antifa, no matter how their individual candidates promised to “get along” with Republicans during the Midterm Campaign.
Only a couple of them had the spine to condemn the actions of these New Bolsheviks, who protested outside of Tucker Carlson’s house, scaring his wife and almost busting down his front door.
What the Democrats need to remember is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
In the case of their planned investigations against President Trump, they need to remember that they live in a humongous glass house.
Between the leaking of congressional secrets through the Congressional IT Scandal involving Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Hillary Clinton Private Server Usage and Clinton Foundation Pay-For-Play Scandals, and the whole sordid FBI /DOJ/FISA Warrant Deep State Spying Scandal, the President has multiple opportunities to have the Senate and the temporary Attorney General bring investigations of his own.
Losing the presidency in 2016 did not smarten up the Democrats at all.
If they go ahead with their fool-hardy plans, they could very likely be setting themselves up to go the way of the Whigs.
…And, it couldn’t happen to a “nicer” bunch.
Until He Comes,
KJ
