We’ve already seen that Democrats intend to use their new majority — and control of House Committees — to initiate investigations that have either never taken place or which were woefully inadequate when Republicans in the majority paid lip service to transparency and truth. They’ve already begun in some aspects, scheduling testimony from Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer to begin in the first week of February.
But Congressman Eliot Engel of New York is ready to take it a step further. Engel is the new chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and he’s made it clear that the first order of business as far as he’s concerned is going to be to create a new subcommittee specifically tasked with investigating Donald Trump.
It’s not actually the creation of a new committee entirely — Engel says he is dissolving a terrorism subcommittee to make room for the new Trump-focused group, citing a lack of “clamor” to maintain the terrorism panel:
We just thought, if we’re going to do something relevant in this era where Congress is going to reassert itself, where there are so many questionable activities of this Administration vis-à -vis foreign policy, that it made sense to have this.”
He told the New Yorker that he intends to focus on “uncovering what Trump promised to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin during their private meeting at the Helsinki summit,” as well as a host of other Russia-friendly motions by the President, including his abrupt pullout from Syria and how his own personal interests may have influenced his policies in the region.
More importantly, Engel cited the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis as a major concern, telling the magazine,
It’s the first time in American history that a Secretary of Defense resigned in protest.”
With their new check on Trump — and the fact that now Democrats represent the only actual impediment to Trump freely doing whatever strikes his fancy, as the rubber-stamp Republicans have allowed him to do for two years — we could be looking at a new era of the Trump presidency aside from anything that Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation may include in its final report.
Featured image via screen capture
