As soon as the 2022 midterm election results showed that the Republicans had won a slim majority and taken control of the House, party members sent letters to at least 42 White House administration officials informing them that they will be expected to testify in a number of GOP-led investigations early next year.
Reuters reported, “In Nov. 18 letters to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and other top administration officials, 19 Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee said they need testimony on issues including border security, school board threats and claims of bias within the FBI and Justice Department.”
Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote to Klain requesting testimony from President Biden’s administration staffers relating to alleged “misuse of federal criminal and counter-terrorism resources to target concerned parents at school board meetings.”
“We expect your unfettered cooperation in arranging for the Committee to receive testimony,” Jordan wrote to Klain.
In a recent press release, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who is set to become House speaker next year, said, “The American people elected a new House Republican majority because the past two years of one-party Democrat rule have failed America.” He added, “These actions by the Biden administration deserve oversight and accountability, which Republicans will pursue in the new Congress.… Every congressional committee has an oversight responsibility, and we intend to finally get the answers the American people deserve.”
In addition to the letter sent to Klain, letters from the House Committee on the Judiciary were sent to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona requesting testimony from certain officials.
All of these letters opened with the same request, stating, “We write again to obtain your voluntary compliance with the outstanding requests for documents and information necessary for our oversight. We appreciate your prompt attention to these outstanding matters.”
Noting that Biden officials have been stonewalling, the letters continued, “Over the past twenty-one months, we have made several requests for information and documents concerning operations and actions…. To date, you have ignored these requests, or you have failed to respond sufficiently…. The Committee may be forced to resort to compulsory process to obtain the material we require.”
The letters appear to be no more than “quid pro quo” or “tit for tat” in the divisive self-serving political circus that the House always appears to be rather than being a governing body humbly representing the people they serve.
In addition to these pending investigations, there is so much more that the new House leadership will review. House Majority Leader-elect Steve Scalise (R-La.) shared that some of the GOP’s priorities for the incoming Congress will be probing the origins of Covid-19, the widely criticized U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and allegations surrounding Hunter Biden.
Scalise told Breitbart, “Whether it’s Hunter Biden’s dealings with all kinds of foreign countries [or] the laptop scandal, which the liberal media tried to dismiss when it came out in 2020 … it’s been verified. It turns out there’s a lot of information on that laptop that raises serious questions, and [Representative] James Comer’s committee’s going to be asking those.”
Scalise then shared that House Republicans “would investigate if federal funds contributed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as part of a broader examination of the origins of COVID-19.”
“The origins of COVID is something we’ve talked about a lot, and looking into whether or not taxpayer money was used by companies like EcoHealth Alliance to promote gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab, where many scientists have said that’s where COVID started, not at some wet market,” said Scalise.
Hoping to finally get answers on Biden’s terrible mismanagement of his government, Scalise said, “We’ve got to be aggressive there [by] looking into things like the Afghanistan withdrawal.… The reports are that there’s $85 billion dollars of the world’s best military equipment that was left behind for the Taliban. What’s true about that? We never got verification of who was in the room. Did they make that decision to leave it behind? Were there C-130s and all these guns?”
After this “shot across the bow” to Biden officials with these letters, we may see some staff resigning to save their careers while others continue to stonewall. But for the average hard-working American, whether they want it or not, the shift of control of the House to Republicans will most likely bring more of the same — a government that continues to be a muckraker’s paradise.
