Democrats call the planned inquiry of President Joe Biden‘s alleged weaponization of the federal government by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives a partisan fishing expedition.
Republicans pledge to utilise their new majority in a vote scheduled for Tuesday against the Justice Department, FBI, and other government agencies looking into Republican former president Donald Trump and his followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Republicans have been accusing the Biden administration of “weaponizing” the FBI about Trump for months.
The committee, which has the working title “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” is about to undertake a thorough inquiry into the Democratic Biden administration.
Kevin McCarthy, the newly elected House Speaker, declared on Saturday that “we will hold the swamp accountable, from the exit of Afghanistan to the genesis of COVID and the weaponization of the FBI.”
The federal agencies looking into Trump’s attempt to reverse his 2020 setback and suspected improper handling of confidential data are among those targeted. These investigations have been labelled “witch hunts” by Trump.
Days after the search for classified material at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in August, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik pledged to launch an investigation into “Joe Biden and his administration’s weaponization of the Department of Justice and FBI… The FBI raid of President Trump is a complete abuse and overreach of its authority.”
Concerns have been voiced by Democrats regarding a clause that allows the committee to look into “ongoing criminal investigations,” which are typically not covered by legislative oversight.
Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, declared that this was a serious infringement of the separation of powers and was also extremely risky.
The White House reported on Monday that attorneys for Biden discovered secret documents at a president-affiliated think group in Washington.
Although there were fewer papers involved and Biden’s team claimed it turned them over immediately upon discovery, some Republicans compared that discovery to the criminal investigation into Trump’s removal of classified documents from the White House. Trump resisted calls to return the documents and is now under investigation for possible obstruction of justice.
Legal experts predicted that any attempt by a congressional committee to seek information connected to active investigations would most probably be rejected by federal law enforcement agencies.
One candidate for a subcommittee seat is Scott Perry, a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee whose phone was confiscated as part of the federal investigation into attempts to rig the 2020 election. He might then try to take charge of a federal probe into himself as a result of that.