Dems slam Trump for ‘stonewalling’ oversight efforts

Two key House Democrats accused the Trump administration and congressional Republicans of “stonewalling” efforts to hold the White House to account.

Reps. Elijah Cummings (Md.) and John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, respectively, wrote in an op-ed in The Baltimore Sun on Friday that their Republican colleagues had all but abdicated their congressional oversight duties.

The Democrats argued that failure of congressional Republicans to sufficiently keep tabs on the actions and authority of President Trump “represents a clear and present danger to the Republic.”

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The pair also accused the Trump administration of stonewalling Democratic lawmakers.

“In the absence of any meaningful investigation by House Republicans, Democratic members have sent requests for information on our own,” Conyers and Cummings wrote. “Our efforts have been met with months of stonewalling.”

“The Trump White House recently told government agencies ‘not to cooperate [with any oversight] requests from Democrats,’ and issued a contrived Justice Department legal opinion that such queries are ‘not properly considered to be oversight requests.’ “

No small part of the Trump administration’s efforts to upend Congress’s oversight role, they wrote, is its efforts to discredit and disrupt the ongoing investigations by multiple House and Senate committees into Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential race.

“Mr. Trump has already characterized the Russia investigation as ‘the single greatest witch hunt in American history,’ being ‘led by some very bad and conflicted people,’ and warned Mr. Mueller not to expand the investigation into his family’s finances beyond Russia,” they wrote, referring to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is charged with leading the Justice Department’s Russia probe.

Cummings and Conyers warned that Trump may not be far from firing Mueller, saying such an ouster “is not hard to envision.”

Some GOP lawmakers, like Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.), who leads one of the committees investigating Russian election meddling, have largely worked with Democrats on the probes.

But Cummings and Conyers slammed the “tepid” approach by some Republicans to their oversight duties and credited Democrats with driving the Russia investigation forward.

“We have taken this series of steps in an attempt to provide at least a measure of independent scrutiny and to mark how Republicans in Congress have repeatedly failed in this responsibility,” they wrote. “We do not have the right to remain silent.”