How Congress Is Tightening the Trap Around the Trump Kids

By Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair

22 March 19

Don Jr., Eric, and even Ivanka are key targets. But by moving deliberately, Congress aims to shift the narrative from Trump’s preferred “presidential harassment” to “What is the White House hiding?”

here is no ‘children’ immunity,” Congressman Eric Swalwell told me on Thursday afternoon. Swalwell, who sits on both the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, was describing the sprawling web of investigations picking up steam within the Democratic-controlled Congress that appear likely to cover the waterfront of the president’s livelihood and extracurriculars—his business interests, his cronies, and yes, even his family members, who have played outsized roles in his campaign and financial interests. The children have traditionally been behind one of Trump’s red lines, but Democrats are trying to flip the script. “We are not going out of our way to hear from the president’s children, but the president has gone out of his way to involve his children in the campaign, in the transition and in the governing of our country,” Swalwell continued. “You can’t violate norms with the nepotism that he operates under and then put up a shield when those children land themselves as potential witnesses.”

Earlier this month, the House Judiciary Committee sent document requests to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who assumed operation of the Trump Organization when their father took office, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Notably, Ivanka Trump was not among the 81 individuals and entities on the sprawling list of investigatory targets. Congressman Ro Khanna told me that there is a greater interest in calling on the eldest Trump sons to testify before Congress than the First Daughter. “Whereas Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump seem to be targets of a criminal investigation”—such as the campaign finance case in the Southern District of New York—“that is not the case as of yet of anyone else in Trump’s family,” he explained. “I think that is the distinction that people are making.”

Since Democrats won back the House, the Trump administration has largely spurned their attempts at oversight. As reported by the Daily Beast, the White House attorneys are preparing to tell the Judiciary Committee “to go fuck themselves.” But an approach like this may play into the hands of Democrats, who are at pains to appear the reasonable ones in this dance. Their strategy is to methodically exhaust the other tools at their disposal before resorting to nuclear options like subpoenas, in order to shift the narrative from Trump’s preferred “presidential harassment” to What is the White House hiding?

Though she wasn't on the initial list, Ivanka is also not likely to escape Democratic scrutiny. Citing “grave breaches of national security,” Elijah Cummings, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, announced in January that his panel would investigate the White House security-clearance process, including whether Trump intervened in the process to ensure that Kushner and Ivanka—both senior White House advisers—were given top-secret clearances. Khanna, who sits on Oversight, stressed that determining why the protocols were abandoned, as well as the concerns of career professionals regarding the First Couple’s clearances, is paramount to national security.

“They don’t deny clearance—certainly for political reasons, and they don’t deny it on a whim. They deny it if there are some very serious concerns,” he told me, noting that he himself went through the process when he served in Barack Obama’s administration. “It is very rare that there are flags. We need to know what those flags were, even if we have to have that behind closed doors in a classified setting. We need to know what are the risks that we are under. And then finally, what can be done now so that those risks are mitigated. In other words, are there security clearances that need to be revoked so that we are no longer under that risk?”

The White House has yet to respond to Democrats’ request for information related to the security-clearance process, according to an op-ed Cummings penned for The Washington Post. “The problem is that the White House is engaged in an unprecedented level of stonewalling, delay, and obstruction,” the chairman wrote. According to reports, Trump pressured former Chief of Staff John Kelly and former White House counsel Don McGahn to grant his daughter and son-in-law clearances over the objections of career officials. And Kelly reportedly documented the president’s request in a contemporaneous memo.

Khanna predicted a legal showdown over the security-clearance issue, including a potential subpoena for Kelly’s testimony, whom he believes may invoke executive privilege. “I think that we may have to subpoena him and we may have to have a legal fight,” he told me. “People claim executive privilege far too broadly . . . My sense is that this is really going to be a legal battle where we are going to have to subpoena the information.”

Swalwell, too, echoed the sentiment that Democrats may need to take more aggressive measures to extract the information they want from the White House on a myriad of issues. “We have the subpoena power in the Congress and we have a Judiciary that will back us up because the precedents in the courts is on our side,” he said. “They are outnumbered.”